The latest statistics on the public postal sector from the UPU reveal that customers spent more on postal services in 2012 than during the previous year – expenditure reached 227.6 billion SDR (349.8 billion USD), an increase of four per cent in nominal terms or one per cent in real terms.
The numbers show continuity in a sector that has been rocked by global forces, including the decline of letter-post volumes and economic and financial uncertainty but buffeted by the rise of e-commerce.
Letter-post generally remained the chief source of income for Posts in 2012 – accounting for a worldwide average of 43.9 per cent of revenues. This despite letter-post volumes continuing their downward slide last year.
Total worldwide letter-post traffic declined by an estimated 3.5 per cent to 350.9 billion items. International items – which represent about one per cent of this total traffic – fell by 7.3 per cent to an estimated 3.7 billion items.
But the drop conceals the fact that weight of items in the letter-post stream is steadily increasing as this category includes small packets weighing up to two kilogrammes.
“With the development of cross-border e-commerce, there are more and more goods that are being transported through the international letter-post stream,” said José Ansón, a UPU economist. “This could be related to consumer choice in times of economic uncertainty, preferring basic letter-post services rather than expensive premium services according to our real-time monitoring of the market evolution,” added Ansón.
Weighty considerations
This commercial activity was also apparent in the sustained rise of global cross-border parcel traffic, which grew by an estimated 6.1 per cent, almost reaching 60 million items last year for incumbent postal operators.
This growth was largely due to the bustling economies of certain emerging countries.
Domestic parcel traffic, however, fell by 1.5 per cent to an estimated 6.4 billion items in 2012, breaking with two decades of nearly constant growth. But this slight decline is unlikely to signal a prolonged cooling of the domestic parcel service, said Ansón, who attributed the dip to vigorous competition among couriers firms and the economic uncertainty still afflicting Europe.
With exponential growth in e-commerce, and Posts restructuring to accommodate changing consumer demand, domestic parcel volumes will grow apace, Ansón predicted.
Regional variations
Global trends of falling letter-post volumes and swelling parcel traffic largely mirrored what happened among Posts of industrialized countries, where the income share of letter-post declined from 65.7 per cent in 2002 to just under 53 per cent in 2012.
Meanwhile, parcels and logistics in industrialized economies grew from a mere 13.4 per cent of income share to 22.1 per cent.
The accessibility of post offices was marked by continued regional disparity in 2012. Globally, 9,264 inhabitants on average were served by a post office.
However, the same average figure for Sub-Saharan Africa was 71,389 inhabitants, while in Northern Africa, it was 21,427. Eastern Europe fared somewhat better with 4,470 inhabitants per post office.
The global postal network comprised an estimated 642,000 post offices last year, a decrease of 1.2 per cent on 2011. Almost 55 per cent of postal establishments were located in Asia Pacific.
Just 1.5 per cent of the world’s post offices are found in Africa, with the network remaining more widely dispersed in developing areas of this region than any comparable network, including banks and courier companies, said Ansón.
Staff numbers too are down. Globally, there were some 5.31 million employees, a decrease of about 1.2 per cent on the previous year.
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