Quickmail board president questions postal service
Quickmail Board Chairman Marc Erni questions the postal service's mandate to provide services in today's world: "If letter volumes are declining, you'd have to think about whether the postman really needs to stop by every mailbox every day."
The question is whether this public service is still necessary in times of digitalization, Erni said in an interview with CH Media printed on Thursday.
At the end of July, it became known that Swiss Post intended to buy the two logistics companies Quickmail and Quickpac, which had been actively seeking buyers. The takeover still had to be approved by the Weko competition commission. That would leave Swiss Post with little competition in the mail business, Erni agreed in an interview. "Here, politicians have failed to create framework conditions that would have enabled competition." But the parcel business is fiercely competitive, he said.
Quickmail mainly sends advertising mail and has a volume of around 100 million items per year, Erni said. "Still, we only cover 53 percent of Swiss households. We would have to reach 85 percent to seriously compete with the Post." The letter business has long been profitable, he said. But, "Letter volumes are steadily declining due to digitization. While Corona had brought us higher volumes for a while, the decline in mailing volumes accelerated sharply after that," Erni said. In addition, the hopes for a liberalization of the mail market were never fulfilled, he said. (SDA)
