Regional postal services told to be prepared
Postal services in this region are being told that the market changes that are taking place must not be ignored.
The advice has come from Patrick Richon, Chairman of the EMS Cooperative. He was speaking during the opening ceremony of the Express Mail Service (EMS) Symposium for the Caribbean region, which was held in the conference room of the General Post Office yesterday morning.
According to Richon, these changes include the threat of a trade war between major economic zones, which he explained will no doubt have a negative impact international trade. Additionally, he said the strengthening of customs regulations is being pushed by countries, aiming to raise more revenue from cross-border ecommerce and to regulate unfair competition created by e-commerce – that is unfair competition between local shops and international e-commerce.
“These regulations create additional barriers and extra costs for entering local markets with a clear focus on security and taxation of e-commerce flows,” he said.
His comments came as he noted that there is increased competition in respect of last mile delivery from private operators, as both traditional competitors and e-commerce platforms like Amazon and Alibaba initiate their own transport and delivery services. Richon added that there is increased competition between the biggest e-commerce platforms to gain market share. This, he explained, has resulted in a rise of such services as free deliveries, same-day deliveries and time-slot deliveries.
“The four largest e-commerce marketplaces represent 65 percent of worldwide online sales. Amazon’s shipping costs are illustrative: US $16 billion in 2016, US $22 billion in 2017 and more than US $23 billion in 2018. In contrast, La Poste Groupe 2018 revenue was 24.7 billion Euro,” he stated.
Meanwhile, speaking to the EMS operations in 2018, he said that despite the growing challenges, the EMS global volumes grew significantly last year, almost eight percent compared to the previous year. As a result, Richon was pleased to note that they had broken the 70 million annual EMS volume barrier for the first time. Moreover, he revealed that end-to-end performance was maintained with 10 percent of the EMS items delivered within two days, and about half of the volume delivered within four days’ time.
“However, EMS performance dropped during the last quarter of 2018. Indeed certain countries with huge inbound EMS volumes need to pursue additional efforts in order to improve delivery performance and ensure the smooth and successful switch to EMSEVT v3; stabilise IT platforms; and improve management of e-commerce high volume periods,” he stated.
The EMS Cooperative Chairman made the point while explaining that Black Friday and Cyber Monday EMS traffic is far exceeding Christmas volumes. As such, he noted that this is leading to an early start to the year-end peak season and a longer peak season, to that end, he hinted that meeting the above mentioned goals is needed now more than ever. (JRT)