Senior postal and express executives kicked off Post-Expo 2017 yesterday with upbeat messages about the industry’s perspectives, including a bold claim from FedEx that B2B e-commerce is much larger than B2C.
UPU Director General Bishar Hussein opened the World Postal Business Forum by highlighting the opportunities and challenges that technology has brought to the postal sector. He described technology as “a double-edged sword”, both enabling mail substitution through electronic communications yet also driving e-commerce growth.
“The pace of technology is so fast. We will not be able to recognise today’s technology in five years’ time,” he commented.
Hussein underlined that much of the world’s population is young and “very advanced” with technology. As a result, “Posts have to be in the digital space,” he said. But the UPU chief also emphasised: “Post is the widest physical distribution network that can never be replaced globally.”
Similar comments came from Kenan Bozgeyik, Director General of Turkish Post and also the current UPU chairman, who predicted: “Technology will make the sector even stronger.” Post-Expo founder Tony Robinson, who welcomed a record number of registrations from 135 countries, forecast that new technologies such as drones and robots would play a vital role for the industry in future.
FedEx’s Carl Asmus and IPC CEO Holger Winklbauer were the two top names in a separate Post-Expo conference session on ‘Strategic challenges and opportunities across the postal and parcel sector’.
Asmus, who is FedEx’s SVP E-commerce and President and CEO of FedEx Cross-Border, underlined that e-commerce has grown so large that “today no one can provide the end to end solution without collaborating or working together”.
He declared: “There is no Post, no integrator and no marketplace that can do all this alone.” He urged the IPC to open up its Interconnect network for postal operators to go “beyond post-to-post” and to offer access to integrators.
Asmus also asserted that B2B e-commerce is actually much larger than B2C. “B2B e-commerce is almost twice the size of the B2C market,” he declared. B2B e-commerce is predicted to reach sales of $6.7 trillion by 2020, he said.
In addition, the long-serving FedEx executive highlighted the need to offer a large range of services covering the e-commerce ecosystem, from transportation, reverse logistics and e-fulfilment through to services such as payments. Otherwise suppliers would be “commoditised”, he warned.
He also emphasised the growing importance of ‘social commerce’ where companies sell direct to consumers through major social media platforms, and the “critical” need to provide alternative delivery locations instead of home deliveries.
IPC chief Holger Winklbauer presented the findings of a recent IPC survey on cross-border e-commerce, which showed that China, the US, the UK and Germany are the main outbound markets, with Amazon, eBay and Alibaba dominating the market.
Low-value light shipments make up about 80% of total cross-border e-commerce volumes, making them “ideal for postal networks”, he pointed out.
Addressing the opportunities and challenges for postal operators, Winklbauer reiterated that Posts are “trusted brands” but warned that the sector faces disruption from new technologies and new business models, and urged postal operators to respond to rapidly changing customer needs with end-to-end services.
Winklbauer reminded participants that IPC’s Interconnect system offers three different products – deferred, standard tracked and premium signed – that cover the different market requirements.
