Customers in Switzerland can now hand in urgent international courier items at the luggage countersof 14 railway stations as well as at post offices across the country.
The documents and goods will be collected by TNT Swiss Post and sent to over 200 countriesworldwide via the URGENT courier service.
Swiss Post said that customers would benefit from the longer opening hours of the SBB trainstation luggage counters which are open at weekends and on public holidays. Documents andgoods sent to addresses in Europe will usually arrive on the next working day.
Documents weighing up to 5kg and parcels weighing up to 10kg can be sent using URGENT, TNTSwiss Post’s international courier service. Customers wishing to send a document within Europe, forinstance, pay a flat rate of CHF 46, while the price for sending a document to a non-Europeanaddress is CHF 74. There is an introductory discount of 10% until February 28, 2007.
Meanwhile, Swiss Post International, Swiss Post’s international mail division, expects togenerate revenues of more than CHF 1 billion for the first time this year.
The Swiss Post business unit, set up in 1996, is now the world’s fifth largest cross-borderletters carrier with subsidiaries in 13 European countries, four Asian states and the USA. It madea profit of CHF 35 million in 2005.
“Swiss Post International’s objective is to strengthen the group as a whole throughselective, profitable growth abroad,” Swiss Post said. “The international business unit of SwissPost is doing extremely well. In terms of both sales and profit, SPI is helping to increase thevalue of the entire group through above-average growth rates.”
SPI is using franchising to develop new cross-border letter traffic business in countrieswith growth potential. It has distribution partnerships with the Slovenian, Spanish and Hungariannational postal operators.
In the cross-border letters market, the company is worldwide behind only Deutsche Post, theUnited States Postal Service, the UK’s Royal Mail and France’s La Poste. SPI’s global workforcenumbers just under 1,000, about half of whom are based in Switzerland.
