Royal Mail, facing an impending strike, announced yesterday that it has lost another lucrativecontract – a GBP 8 million (EUR 12 million) deal to deliver the second-class letters of online
retailer Amazon. The new carrier is not yet known.The state postal operator has been losing business to competitors in the fully-liberalisedBritish postal market over the last year, including multi-million pound government and privatecontracts to rivals such as Business Post’s UK Mail and TNT Post. British Telecom, utility Centricaand the government’s pensions and work department have all switched from Royal Mail.
Royal Mail has been criticised by Postcomm, the UK postal regulator, for paying too much tostaff, which makes it difficult for the company to compete in the deregulated UK market.
Royal Mail said in a statement: “We’re very proud to work with Amazon and the loss of such asignificant piece of their business demonstrates very clearly that Royal Mail’s higher costs,directly caused by our failure to fully modernise our operations, are costing us business. It’svital that we urgently change and modernise if we are to be able to compete against more efficientrivals who have already done so.
“At the same time our customers are being threatened with disruption because of strikes –strikes which are aimed at preventing exactly the modernisation that could keep our big customerson board. Customers like Amazon are critical to us, and to our competitors. They represent animportant area of growth in a market which is otherwise declining as fewer items of mail are sent.”
The Communication Workers Union said its 130,000 members would strike over a below-inflationpay offer if no deal is reached in arbitration today.
