Sue Whalley was appointed Chief Operations Officer at Royal Mail in 2014 and, subsequently, Managing Director of Royal Mail Letters and Network. She will become Chief Executive Officer of Post and Parcels, Royal Mail UK, which consists of all the revenue and operations in the UK, other than Parcelforce Worldwide and Royal Mail International.
This comes at the time Moya Greene will step down as Royal Mail Group CEO to be replaced by her successor Rico Back.
Previously Sue was Strategy, Regulation & Government Affairs Director at Royal Mail from September 2006 through to 2014. Prior to joining Royal Mail, Sue was a consultant at McKinsey & Company for 17 years, the last six of which were as a partner in the London office.
Sue will join the Board on 1 June 2018 and will play a key role in representing the Company in the UK. She is a highly experienced executive, and is leading the transformation of Royal Mail’s UK operation. She is a former partner at McKinsey & Company, where she advised blue chip companies on strategy, business transformation and stakeholder management.
To give you an idea of the scale of Royal Mail and Sue’s task, she’ll be taking care of the UK’s largest delivery company for letters and parcels which also delivers the UK Universal Service Obligation with:
- Total revenue: £7,658m
- Parcel volumes: 1.2bn
- Letter volumes: 14.9bn
- 142,000 employees
- 38 Mail Centres
- around 1,400 Delivery Offices
Reported operating profits after transformation costs for UK Parcels, International and Letters (UKPIL) increased from loss of £120 million in 2010-11 to profit of £326 million in 2016-17.
SMEs value Royal Mail with 77% satisfied or very satisfied. 73% of business customers state that Royal Mail meets their delivery promises. Satisfaction with Royal Mail has increased from 72%% in Q2 2016 to 83% in Q2 2017 according to the Ofcom annual monitoring update on the postal market.
Sue is also successfully leading one of the largest industrial transformation programmes ever undertaken in the country. She played the principal role in negotiating the operational aspects of the recent agreement with CWU, and is leading on the implementation of all of it. This has included:
- Investing £1.5 billion in the UK business since privatisation to 2016-17 – one of the biggest industrial transformations ever undertaken in the UK.
- One of the largest roll-outs of handheld scanners (PDAs) in Europe, barcoding and tracking systems, customer apps and customer portals.
- Drivening a cost-conscious culture whilst improving productivity within the two-three per cent target over the last three years.
- Leading the Strategic Mailing Partnership, a joint initiative with the mail industry to improve overall efficiency of operational processes in UK letters.
- Introducing parcel automation machines for reading barcodes at 5 mail centres across the UK.
