Royal Mail have shipped 117 million more parcels in the three months from the 30th of March to the 28th of June. That’s the result of a pandemic showing millions of consumers stayed at home and switched to online shopping while the shops were closed.
From a consumer perspective it’s all good news – more online purchases arrived at home but at the same time advertising mail was impacted with low levels of business activity and so there was less junk mail arriving on our doorsteps. One might also consider this a good thing, but delivering millions fewer letters isn’t going to be good for Royal Mail’s finances.
“As the UK starts to come out of lockdown we are not seeing any change as yet in customer behaviour. Our customers are wanting more parcels delivered to their homes and are sending fewer letters. We are working as quickly as we can t o adapt our business to meet our customer needs.”
– Royal Mail
Royal Mail Quarterly Volume Highlights
Royal Mail
- Parcel volume up 38% year on year (117 million more parcels)
- Domestic account (excluding Amazon) parcel volume up 64%
- Addressed letters (excluding elections) volume down 33,788 million fewer letters
GLS
- Volumes up 22% year on year
Ongoing operations
The integration of Parcelforce into Royal Mail is continuing with Nick Landon acting as Chief Commercial Officer with oversight of all commercial and service areas for UKPIL and Parcelforce.
The management restructure which will see 2,000 senior leaders and managers made redundant and actions on non people costs in Royal Mail, alongside Group capex reduction initiatives, are all underway.
Royal Mail are also back in talks with the CWU with the aim to develop a mutual interest strategy to build a successful future for customers, employees and the business. Talks will also address the immediate operational and financial challenges facing the business covering five key strands:
- The financial position of the company
- Local revision and change activity
- Pay
- Operational change and the future strategy of Royal Mail, including Parcelforce
- The potential to better use the company’s unrivalled infrastructure
Royal Mail still expect to be materially loss-making in the 2020-21 financial year with no final dividend for 2019-20 and no dividend expected to be paid for the whole of 2020-21. If GLS continues to perform this might support a dividend in 2021-2022… if the company isn’t forced to sell off the division in the mean time.
9 Responses
All mine is business post franked small and large letters.
They seem to have forgotten about this side of the business more often than I and other sellers would like.
If they are more interested in parcels fairly obvious by the fact that they shut down Saturday deliveries for some weeks for letter post, then this fact should be publicised,
I have always advocated RM service but just lately the number of people saying theirs has not arrived sometimes from a month ago, is distressing to me, alarming and costly.
Are they actually going to reorganise so they can cope as things seems to be getting worse and on their site it still says 1st class delivery aim 1-2 days. We can all have an aim but at some point own up that we are failing in this aim so others / customers know about it rather than blaming sellers.
Royal Hermes ?
is in the post
117 milion more parcels sent?
And how many lost?
I have never before claimed for so many lost parcels (RM Tracked so fully eligible for compensation).
Our stats show that only 65-70% of Tracked were delivered within their time limit… since the lockdown started. This is disgrace with big D.
Rm24/48 is another story. Daily enquires from buyers about whereabouts of their parcels….
Am afraid they have been poor. The service has become from a business point of view worse year on year. They are taking 7 days for 24 hour post still in some cases and are not scanning items. No upscaling, No evolving the service, just poorer and poorer. Still waiting for my mail sack delivery they cannot even get that right. Got hammered with silly ebay defects yesterday because of them also.
Complaining is pointless as they have become so poor you will only ever receive a jobsworth reply a couple of weeks later.
I hope it does get taken over now and they properly modernize the whole thing as right now it is not fit for purpose.
Plus as a shareholder no dividend waste of money.
Any chance of Royal Mail coming back on this. You really are killing business especially affecting small business. If you are delivering that many less letters why are you not delivering all mine on time?
“Addressed letters (excluding elections) volume down 33,788 million fewer letters” … i’m suspicious that volume of addressed letters could have dropped by 33billion.
I suspect this should be “down 33 percent, 788 million fewer”