Member Info for Pauly70

@Oligarch. Cheers for the appreciative post and yes I do identify as male :)

@Moneyspratt

You really are a very childish man aren't you with your 'LOL LOL LOL's' and tedious pedantry.

The whole point of trying to change or rejig the USO is to reduce the headcount thereby making savings. There is NO other way for RM to save money.

If any of these changes go through it will result in tens of thousands of job losses(by VR if in '24 or by VR and CR if in '25)

You know nothing about how Royal Mail works on the inside or its culture.

All you see is the figures in the accounts and jump on any positive spin with masturbatory glee.

'Royal Mail has already shown signs of recovery'. Don't believe a word of it Oli.

Christmas '22 was not a LFL comparison as there were strike days in double figures and Christmas 21 & '20 were during the Covid years when people were sat at home ordering stuff month after month, so no Christmas pressure those years.

The Christmas '23 figures are only comparable with 2019 on a LFL basis and obviously Christmas is by far the busiest quarter of the year and yet even with this so called fantastic month, what is the guidance for FY? Erm 'roundabout breakeven'

The traffic throughout January '24 has been woeful. Letters(no surprise)AND parcels have dropped considerably(even on normal January levels)

I will now confidently predict that there will be a profit warning for Q4 and any hope of breaking even will be a pipedream.

Royal Mail was clearly f**ked on the letters side, but now also looks Increasingly so on small and medium sized parcels too.

Evri have pensioners and 'self employed'(mostly people working while on benefits) people delivering parcels for about 80p per parcel in every town in Britain with hardly any overheads.

RM will NEVER be able to compete with that.

If by some miracle RM are able to navigate the regulations into delivering letters on alternate days(with just first class going out daily)thereby reducing headcount by 25 - 35% , the redundancy costs will be between £500 million to £1 billion pounds. Ouch!

The super hubs are a great idea, but they've come at least 5 years too late(was it ever thus with RM). The damage has already been done.

The market share they could have consolidated and grown with earlier action on transformation is now constantly and viciously under attack by rivals.

Most people criticise the hapless Simon Thompson but he was the only one who had the balls to take on the CWU numbskulls, render them a seriously depleted threat and tell everyone the hard, cold truth about the company and its future.

The volume is never coming back Derek.

The mail is thinning month by month.

Seidenberg probably can't believe the state of what he's walked in to.

I bet he's already pining for his desk at GLS and the guaranteed satisfaction of an annual profit.

Royal Mail and the word profit will not share the same sentence again until at least 30,000 posties are let go of.

It is an impossible business model in 2024 and no one can turn back time to make the company successful again.

@TheMoneyShark Rant? Seems to me like you're the angry ranter here.

The auction prospectus was published last week. So you know how it went do you? Please enlighten me.

IDS has a CEO(Martin Seidenberg) who in turn has the task of appointing a RMG CEO. Understand?

Royal Mail has announced that it has lost 10% market share in every postcode since the strike action(a highly placed source in the recent Times article). How's that for you?

If you want 'evidence' of Dave Ward's recent update on RMG's cashflow issues and difficulties in appointing a CEO then I direct you to the CWU website for Dave's latest live session. I'm sure you'll enjoy it

You must own some serious equity in IDS to be so over sensitive due to a perfectly legitimate post eh?

Keep believing in the RM dream though. I assure you it's more akin to a pantomime now.

I wonder if the note was written by Sam Bland, the JP Morgan analyst who put a price target of £10.00 on IDS a couple of years back 😆

It probably was as this note sounds as irrationally exuberant as that one.

Kretinsky has stated he has no wish to split the group up, but rather to endeavour to make the UK arm as efficient as GLS.

Also, even if the parcel market is expanding(I doubt it at the moment) that business ain't going to Royal Mail. It's going to Evri, Amazon, DPD and the other well run companies.

It will be interesting to see how last week's RMG bond auction plays out. If it doesn't go well, I'd say RM are in big trouble.

Dodgy Dave Ward has already recently announced that the company is having serious cashflow issues and is struggling to find anyone daft enough to accept the role of CEO.

I think that there is a far greater chance of special administration long before any changes could possibly be made to the USO and that's if the grandstanding MP's don't vote against it anyway.

@Bomberharris

Absolutely spot on Bomber.

This attitude prevails throughout almost every D.O, which is why(as I've stated previously) RMPIL will never make a profit as long as the current framework exists; deal or no deal.

Even if there is a yes vote, there will be tens of thousands voting no and they will all double down on their all to familiar intransigent working practices.

Like him or not, Thompson had the CWU on the ropes like Rico Back before him, but instead of letting him landing the killer blow, the board bottled it(as usual) defenestrated the CEO and rowed back on many necessary changes. Laughably pathetic.

The UK arm will continue to lose market share, competitiveness and relevance and It's all they deserve.

The SP performance of this company never fails to disappoint.

I'm amazed private equity aren't sniffing around it on such a low valuation

I just spoke to my postie blah,blah,blah haha.

Are you two for real?!

Goldfingers' post is particularly hilarious. His imaginary perfect postman ' doesn't care much about start times or conditions'.

'He wants to get the company back on a sound financial footing' and says that the socialist trouble makers won't bother to vote.

Are you sure this wasn't just your IDS inspired wet dream from the night before?

A postie who doesn't care about conditions does not exist.

Most posties do not view Royal Mail through the same eyes as an investor or accountant and a significant number are now hoping that the company *does* go into special administration.

If you want a real taste of what RM CWU members are thinking, have a little look at the CWU Facebook page and you'll get it and it is nothing like your investor-biased fantasies.

Most posties now seem to be even angrier with the CWU than they are with RM and that takes some doing.

My hunch is that the CWU will either pretend to have been placated by RM's reassurances on Tuesday or that they will withdraw any recommendation on how the members should vote in the ballot when it goes ahead.

I think it will be a No vote followed by a clamour by CWU members for fresh strike action(pointless but inevitable.) The CWU know this is a bad idea which will achieve nothing and will tear themselves apart trying to figure out what to do next.

IDS will ask the government for permission to place Royal Mail into special administration to attempt to sort this intractable, schizophrenic, lumbering company out once and for all.

As for investors in IDS,

@dab808

Spot on. Agree with everything you said.

Sold out a month ago. Will never return.

God knows what Kretinsky is making of that boards behaviour!

I can almost hear the analysts who still believed in RM typing out there double downgrades as I sit here.

As someone who has worked for RM for 17 years, my opinion is that the Covid era was a positive blip and that this company is just not very likely to ever make any real money again.

Even if the workforce vote yes(50/50 at best) on the deal they will never support or go along with it on the shopfloor.

As I've stated before, the average age of a RM employee is 55. Even if they wanted to embrace new working practices, they will struggle to do so.

Then there is the large intransigent lump who oppose every change just for the sake of it.

When I'm out on my round delivering I can see the damage the myriad couriers are doing to RM.

People I used to deliver parcels to nearly every day are still buying them, it's just that I am no longer delivering them.

'I haven't seen you for ages' goes the refrain. 'It's all Amazon and Evri at ours now' Fact.

And this is supposed to be the segment that will provide a profitable future for the company?!

The change has been too little and far too late. They will always be playing catch up and failing badly.

Those couriers are incentivised and do not have the RM safety net underneath them and boy does it show. They deliver 3 or 4 times as many parcels as an average RM driver in the same time. There is no way on Earth RM will ever compete with them. They are younger, fitter, faster and committed.

Letting the union back in was the biggest mistake(of many) the board made during the latest negotiations. They are pathetically weak.

They take a year to make a decision, two years to try and implement said plan and then abandon it completely or dilute all the good out of it at the insistence of the big, scary CWU.

I would not invest a pound in this hamstrung, disabled, dysfunctional company and neither would 99% of it's workforce.

Apart from the decline in parcels, continued terminal decline in letters and huge loss, the point the city will hate most is that Keith Williams now states that due to the new agreement endorsed by the CWU, there is now no need to split RM & GLS. Well whoopee!

That is what we were all pinning are hopes on Keith.

This financial statement and Keith Williams' naivety regarding the RM shopfloor and his CEO appointments does not bode well.

@Broch. No way have you achieved that lifestyle through working as a postie on circa £26,000 pa. I'm guessing your wife is the one who earns the proper money...

i'm guessing the new ceo will be someone from within royal mail or who has previously worked for royal mail.

who else of any calibre would want anything to do with this basket case of a company after the way the board left thompson to take all the incoming fire from all directions without a single utterance of support.

the ids board has always been weak and easily intimidated by the numbskull bullies from the cwu and that won't change.

just look at how much they've rowed back from thompson's best and final offer to placate dinosaur dave. pathetic.

rick mcaulay must be punching walls watching what is going on with the dilution of the well thought out, proposed changes to appease the cwu.

a no vote would be a blessing in disguise for royal mail as it would inevitably lead to special administration which would present the only possible way to provide the conditions needed to make the widespread, urgent(not in 12 months time for god's sake) and brutal changes necessary to turn this sh*tshow of a company around.

if this half ****d deal is passed, rm will just continue to wither, lose vast amounts of money and die a slow, lingering death.

I'm not so sure about that Scamp. If it's a deal RMG are amenable to, then by definition the majority of the workforce will definitely NOT be so inclined.

Remember that 95.9% voted yes to further strike action only two months ago.

The PEC might even knock it back before that.

I think it will be a very close thing.

@Sid786 Neither of them fill me with confidence regarding their intelligence.

Nice, well meaning socialists with as much business nous as a house brick.

Just to update people here on some nuggets of Ward's wisdom from tonight's CWU update:

Dave has sought advice from 'experts' on rumours that RM might go into administration.
(Presumably, these are the same experts whose advice has led to several proposed strikes having to be cancelled due to their incompetence.)

Anyway, according to Dave's 'experts' , the fret(sic) of administration is 'overstated' because the share price has gone up today and why would the big players in the city be buying shares if they thought RMG was goin' into administration.

Wow. Where do you start?

Firstly only the parts of RMG group governed by the USO would be placed in special administration, not the whole group(Dave doesn't get this)

Secondly, special administration is the best way forward for both the future existence of RMPIL and shareholders as it will inevitably lead to an appropriate reduction in headcount, ALL of the boards proposals being implemented and probably emergency changes to the USO.

Dave also still says thinks if the members stick together with the union, 'We will win this dispute' and that he expects talks to resume next week??

There is no talking sense to this man and even if the members did get a vote on what RM is offering, I'm sure there would be a majority voting no as they, like Dave are convinced that RMG is bluffing about administration and that they are close to caving in to the CWU's demands.

The outcome is inevitable. Any further talks are futile. Special administration, then a Kretinsky buyout of the parts of the group he wants.

@ Oligarch. Have you ever watched a CWU broadcast with Dave Ward? The man is a 1980's style union caveman with the business acumen to go with it.
RM have been around the table with that mob for 6 months. If the board acquiesce to these illiterate morons RM is finished anyway.
The only hope Royal Mail has now is to go ahead with ALL of the proposed changes ASAP and ignore the CWU.
If workers don't want the job they can leave(which very few will, as they're not qualified for anything else)
It is now make or break and the result today proves the RM now need to deploy the nuclear option or the UK business is dead in the water.

Well RM really have nothing to lose now by going for broke with pushing the changes through.
This ballot result proves that posties would back the CWU stance regardless of anything RM offer.

I genuinely believe they would do whatever Dave Ward told them to do even if it meant losing their jobs and that is quite incredible.

@Ross1995 Thanks for that.
Reaffirms what I posted earlier. The board are out to crush the Union this time and they will succeed. The sooner the better.
The CWU have been the architects of their own destruction.