Norway Post has announced nine-month operating revenues of NOK18,451 million (€1,971 million), an increase of 3.4% on the same period last year with its logistics business growing increased “despite a demanding market.”
Operating profit before non-recurring items (EBIT) was NOK 472 million in the third quarter, which is NOK 48 million lower than last year (9.2 percent).
Mail volumes have fallen by 5.5% so far this year. The logistics market is directly affected by the downturn in the oil industry and its repercussions for other areas of the market. This has led to profitability challenges in parts of the logistics business. In spite of this, the logistics segment saw sales grow by 3.6%, mainly from Nordic operations, the postal utility said in a statement.
“We will continue to restructure our operations in line with new user needs and adjust our capacity to market fluctuations. Lower profitability means that we are taking measures to account for this trend,” Norway Post CEO, Dag Mejdell, said.
As a result of Norway's new Postal Services Act, which comes into force in the New Year, the market will be open to competition and there will no longer be an obligation to deliver post six days a week.
Norway Post underlined that it will discontinue Saturday deliveries of letters on 5 March 2016 to adjust operations and expenses to the sustained decline in letter volumes. Deliveries of newspapers on Saturdays will continue.
“From March 2016, letters will arrive in mailboxes on Monday instead of Saturday. The opening hours of post offices and in-store postal services will not be affected and people will be able to use our services and pick up parcels as before at over 1400 locations countrywide – on Saturdays as well,” Mejdell explains.
Norway Post had "high delivery rates and fulfilled all licensing requirements in the third quarter of 2015. The delivery rate for overnight first class post was 87.3%, or 2.3 percentage points above the licensing requirement."
As for online commerce growth, this is expected to continue and the group’s overall volume of e-commerce increased by 8% in the first nine months of last year.
Finally, more and more public organisations have decided to use Norway Post's secure digital mailbox. Digipost, with 540,000 users recorded at the end of Q3. By the first quarter of 2016, public organisations will generally communicate digitally with citizens and the number of users is expected to increase rapidly.
“We chose to be proactive in meeting digitisation and developed Digipost. This allows recipients to collect all important post from public institutions and private senders in one secure digital mailbox,” Mejdell explained.
