Polish mail and parcels company InPost is pressing ahead with innovative services by marketingthrough Facebook and a new mobile internet offering, and is also selling its parcel terminals to
foreign postal operators.The listed company continued to grow last year, delivering 30 per cent of unaddressed mailand 141 million addressed items, or 10 per cent of addressed mail in Poland, CEO Rafal Brzoska,told last week’s European Postal Services conference in London. In response to the general declinein mail, however, the company is focusing strongly on growing its parcels business.
InPost now has 420 self-service parcel collection and drop-off terminals across the country,operating under the new international name of ‘easyPack 24/7’, and wants to extend the network to800 machines by the end of 2012, he said. It has 110,000 registered users, and 61 per cent ofclients are repeat users.
InPost, which both manufactures and operates the terminals, has agreed to sell five terminalsto Estonian Post and will deliver machines to five other countries this year, Brzoska told industrymanagers.
“We have broken even with the machines after just one year. That’s why we are implementingthe solution in other countries,” he commented. The easyPack 24/7 machines cut last-mile costs by80 per cent and replaced 10 delivery workers, he pointed out. A high 97 per cent of parcels aredelivered to the terminals one day after posting, and 51 per cent of the goods are collected withinsix hours of being deposited there.
InPost is making heavy use of social media in Poland and has built up a following of some260,000 fans for its Facebook commercial page, Brzoska said. Its Facebook sales application InFlavohas been used to create 210 shops and a marketplace on Facebook, all of which use the easyPack 24/7terminals for parcel delivery.
In a separate move, InPost has launched free internet access for smartphones under the ‘free-m’ brand. The service is financed by advertising, and consumers gain 30 minutes of freeinternet access or 2 minutes of free phone calls for each advert that they view, Brzoska explained.
“We are creating demand for our services and we want to share all this knowledge withpartners,” he told an audience of European managers. “The real future is when e-commerce ispan-European without any high barriers,” he concluded.
