Summing up the biggest stories of the week from the pages of Post&Parcel, with USPS achieving good growth in the package business, and DPD prepares to build a £100m hub in the UK.
USPS package growth props up revenues in Q2
Package and shipping services helped the US Postal Service to stabilise revenues in the second quarter of its 2013 financial year, as it more than halved its losses compared to the same quarter last year.
Growth in parcel services, driven by e-commerce, along with an increase in Standard Mail compensated for the revenue lost by ongoing declines in First Class Mail volumes, as Standard Mail services saw slight growth year-on-year. The growth in the second quarter means that the Postal Service has achieved its first growth for the first half of the year in five years.
The Postal Service still racked up a $1.9bn loss in the three months up to the end of March, on $16.3bn of revenue. Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe called for Congress to pass postal reform legislation.
DPD UK hires property firm to develop £100m parcel hub
DPD UK has appointed a property developer to begin work on a new £100m parcel hub in the East Midlands.
The company has tasked Goodman to develop a 30,658 square metre (330,000 sq ft) site in Hinckley, close to the M69 motorway in south-west Leicestershire. Assuming the project secures planning permission, the facility at the Hinckley Commercial Park could see construction beginning this September.
It should be fully operational in 2015, creating as many as 1,000 full-time jobs in the process. The planned facility will be the largest parcel hub of its kind, DPD said, capable of handling 70,000 parcels each hour, to increase DPD’s overall UK parcel capacity by 65%.
Failed TNT Express sale pushes PostNL into the red
The collapse of the TNT Express takeover deal has ended up costing Dutch postal service PostNL around EUR 440m, pushing it into a EUR 410m loss for the first quarter of 2013.
The company issued its first quarter results this week, showing that it has written off a third of the value of its shares in TNT Express, which it now believes are worth EUR 927m. The TNT share price halved overnight at the start of the year, as the European Commission blocked the EUR 5.2bn offer by UPS to buy the company, in which PostNL has a 29% stake.
The share value write-off left PostNL slipping into the red for the first quarter of the year, recording a EUR 410m loss compared to a EUR 633m profit seen in the same period last year. Excluding the impacts of TNT Express, profits would still have fallen by 48%, from EUR 62m to EUR 32m.
Source: Post&Parcel
Tags: DPD, PostNL, TNT Express, USPS
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