Postal operators in Asia Pacific, like their counterparts elsewhere around the world, plan to focus on improved efficiency of the end-to-end postal supply chain and e-commerce as their top priorities in the coming years.
Other regional priorities are financial services, postal sector development and the diversification of products and services, delegates agreed at a recent regional strategy conference in Bangkok.
The two-day conference brought together representatives from 28 nations from the region and was organised by the Asia Pacific Postal Union, which is part of the Universal Postal Union (UPU). The event was the latest in a series of regional strategy conferences ahead of the UPU Congress in Istanbul in 2016.
Speakers from Asia Pacific highlighted a number of challenges facing postal operators in the region, ranging from the fast pace of e-commerce development to major disparities in economic development within the region. Asia-Pacific includes 13 least developed countries, 20 developing countries, and three industrialised countries.
For their top areas of intervention, Asia-Pacific nations chose developing e-commerce and improving operational efficiencies along the entire postal supply chain, including transport, security and customs, among others. Secondary areas of intervention singled out by delegates included the development of postal financial services to foster financial inclusion.
UPU said this was the fourth of seven regional conferences being held in all world regions, a series of high-level meetings meant to shape the World Postal Strategy for the 2017-2020 work cycle. This roadmap for global postal services will be signed off at the UPU Congress next year in Istanbul, Turkey.
The outcomes of the Bangkok conference echo those of other world regions, UPU pointed out. Recent strategy conferences in Africa, Latin America, and Europe and the CIS have all highlighted operational efficiency and e-commerce as priority areas for development.
At the Europe and CIS conference in Minsk in June, UPU Director General Bishar Hussein had called on participants to embrace change, including new technologies and business models, as well as innovations to meet customer demands. “We will bring down the barriers to cross-border postal deliveries,” he underlined, adding that solutions aimed at improving postal integration include the UPU’s new e-commerce programme, ECOMPRO.
An additional topic of discussion at the Latin America conference in Santo Domingo in June was the need to strengthen designated postal operators in the face of competition. Hussein told LatAm delegates: “Cross-border incursions by postal organisations on territories of others in the name of liberalisation and competition has changed the postal landscape. It is time UPU member countries deal with these sensitive questions head on.”
Key issues at the earlier Africa conference in Khartoum also included the need to improve service quality, offer new services, modernise regulation and tackle infrastructure problems.
The next regional conference, bringing together delegates from the Arab region, is scheduled to take place later in September in Dubai.
