The Finnish postal operator announced improved revenues for the third quarter, with sales up toalmost €360 million, from €310m last year.
A quarter of net sales derived from international operations, while pre-tax profit wasslightly down to €16.4m from €18.5m.
Letter-mail volumes declined in line with the pan-European trend. Information Logistics’ netsales showed favourable developments in all of its product groups, with the exception of Germany.Logistics reported growth of 56% in its net sales, organic growth accounting for 11 percentagepoints.
On the current issue of EU postal liberalisation, CEO Jukka Alho said: “Finland Post stronglysupports the EU Commission’s objective of opening up postal services to competition throughout theEU by 2009. It is important that competition also be possible in the home market of postalcompanies much larger than us and operating internationally.”
“How the EU member states will manage financing for the universal service in sparselypopulated areas will become one of the most important issues in subsequent discussion of the PostalDirective. This will also be a vital issue in Finland if letter mail volumes decreasesubstantially as a result of electronic data interchange,” he added.
