Customers in Germany are starting to seek parcel delivery alternatives, with Hermes reporting a surge of enquiries, as the indefinite postal strike at Deutsche Post DHL spread wider across the country today, leaving about 20% of volumes delayed.
Some 17,800 Deutsche Post employees in 83 mail sorting centres as well as mail and parcel delivery operations are now on strike, although the company’s 33 parcel sorting centres have not yet been affected. Over the last two days, some 3,000 staff, mostly parcel delivery workers in urban areas and ‘combined delivery’ staff (who deliver letters and parcels in rural areas), have joined the strike, which started on Monday.
Overall, Deutsche Post has some 130,000 employees in its German mail and parcel sorting and delivery operations, including some 86,000 mail and combined delivery workers, 11,000 parcel delivery staff and about 6,000 workers at the 49 new regional DHL Delivery parcel firms whose creation is the heart of the long-running dispute.
A Deutsche Post spokeswoman told CEP-Research: “Overall, more than 82% of letters and 80% of parcels will reach their recipients punctually. With the delayed parcels we expect that these can be delivered with just one day’s delay.” This would mean about 700,000 parcels out of the daily volume of 3.5 million items will be delayed by 24 hours.
Meanwhile, Hermes, the second-largest consumer parcels delivery company in Germany, said that it is already handling more private parcels and has been contacted by shippers enquiring about switching B2C volumes to the company.
Spokesman Martin Frommhold told CEP-Research: “For several days we have registered higher volumes from private customers, in other words, C2C parcels through the more than 14,000 Hermes parcel shops in Germany.”
In terms of B2C business customers, those already using DHL together with other parcel carriers “are certainly already partly re-routing to other service providers”, while shippers using exclusively DHL to date “are of course enquiring about alternatives”, he added. “As a result, we also have numerous requests.” These requests each cover from 10,000 to 50,000 parcels per day.
“Due to our modern and high-performance infrastructure we can fundamentally handle additional volume up to a certain level. Therefore we carefully review what we can do in terms of the region that the enquiry comes from – and then we are happy to help,” Frommhold commented. Hermes is investing €300 million over the next four years to expand its logistics capacity in Germany to cope with rising volumes.
GLS, the Royal Mail subsidiary, was more cautious with its response. A spokesperson said: “GLS is registering a continuous rise in parcel volumes. Whether the strikes at Deutsche Post contribute to this is difficult to judge.”
In contrast, DPD said it is not seeking to win DHL parcel volumes for pricing reasons. “The consequences of the postal strike are limited for DPD,” said a spokesman. “The reason is that many parcels are transported for a very low price. This isn’t attractive for DPD. We don’t want to be a ‘stopgap’ for the Post.”
Asked whether Deutsche Post DHL is seeing customers switch to competitors, the spokeswoman responded: “No, we don’t see that at present. On the contrary, we even have some offers from large customers who want to make their own staff available to us in order to keep the overall consequences as minimal as possible.”
Commenting on a report in German newspaper Die Welt that DHL is giving Amazon preferential treatment during the strike, she explained: “With Amazon we have developed an especially fast parcel service – PRIME – which Amazon pays a higher price for. But we also offer this to other customers.” Amazon is believed to ship the bulk of its Prime parcels in Germany through DHL, though other carriers are used occasionally.
