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MS - "And for the fifth time, Kretinsky and VESA were cleared last year by the government to do as he likes with International Distributions Services…"
No they weren't. VESA were given permission to increase their holding above 25% up to 50%.
There are further triggers when going above 50% and going above 75%.
There's a helpful example on the gov website - https://www.gov.uk/guidance/national-security-and-investment-act-guidance-on-acquisitions
"Example
Investor A owns 20% of Entity B and acquires shares comprising 10% more, leaving Investor A with 30% in total. This is a qualifying acquisition because it takes Investor A’s shareholding from 25% or less to more than 25%, which is a qualifying acquisition threshold set out in the NSI Act.
Investor A then acquires an additional 10%, leaving them with 40% of the shares. This is not usually a qualifying acquisition because Investor A’s shareholding has not met or passed any of the 3 thresholds.
Investor A then acquires an additional 15%, leaving them with 55% of the shares. This is a qualifying acquisition because it takes Investor A’s shareholding from 50% or less to more than 50%, which is a qualifying acquisition threshold."
The government said at the time "Under the National Security and Investment Act (2021) acquisitions are assessed on a case-by-case basis, so any future acquisition could be subject to a separate assessment under the Act if deemed necessary."
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-to-take-no-further-action-under-the-national-security-and-investment-act-2021-on-royal-mail-share-acquisition
Parcels on their own aren't profitable. Ask Evri or Yodel!
Bear in mind Royal Mail prices for non-contract Tracked booked online are virtually the same, and for 1Kg-2Kg parcels actually cheaper than Evri. Undercutting a company that's making a loss. That'll work!
If you saw how many staff we have in on Sundays vs how many parcels you'll see it can't be profitable. RM are paying around £2 for every parcel to be delivered in staff wages alone. These items cost the public from £3.99 to send. Of course we don't know how much the likes of Moonpig are being charged but it'll be considerably less.
You won't find any other courier paying drivers £2 an item.
As an aside, the amount of Amazon parcels we see at our office has dramatically reduced. Either they've employed more drivers, they're sending less out or they're using other carriers more.
A couple of days ago it was mentioned on here about staff numbers. Since the new year we've seen an influx of new starters and, looking at the website, there are still a lot of vacancies for posties. It hasn't been like this for years. My theory is that a decision was made nationally to reduce numbers by natural wastage and see how far they could go assuming the government would agree to a reduced USO service. That hasn't happened so now they're going the other way. My office alone has seen a 10% increase in staff since the new year and, last time I looked, there were still four vacancies listed on the recruitment site. We're still at lower levels than pre-pandemic though.
We've also had that rare phenomenon of mangers prioritising letters recently due to poll tax bills and electoral voting cards coming through. Funny how they can get the letters delivered and leave packets when they want to. I guess the publicity of delivering these late would be too much even for Royal Mail's press team to handle with their lies about rotating rounds etc.
Overall, I expect USO quality of service to finally start going up in 2024/25. It's too late for this financial year and there will be another fine coming up when Ofcom get around to it. It's just a question of how much but it'll obviously be more than last year's fine as the figures haven't improved at all this year.
Whistl's £600 million lawsuit won't happen until late 2025 now so that's money RM will ignore for another year. They're confident Whistl will lose but they were confident Whistl would lose the cases they won so that's reassuring!
And then there's the self-employed Parcelforce driver's lawsuit coming up. Again. other companies have lost similar cases but RM are confident they'll win. I wouldn't put money on that.
The latest Quality of Service figures were released yesterday.
Q3 was even worse than Q1 and Q2. And December isn't included in the figures.
70.1% of First Class USO mail delivered on time. 90.2% of Second Class.
Even Special Deliveries were down at 95.8%.
I dunno if the regulator is stupid but it's there in black and white that managers are routinely lying on their daily reports.
Apparently 86.83% of rounds were completed each day - so how come we're only delivering 70.1% of the mail? Don't tell me that over 15% of First Class mail isn't arriving in every DO in the country on time.
RM don't have to release figures for Tracked as these aren't part of the USO. In my office we're usually at 98% or more each day, and we get a few thousand in every day. Be interesting if the media stopped banging on about packets being prioritised and instead got it into their heads that it's Tracked, letters and packets, that are prioritised, even at the expense of Special Delivery these days. Non-Tracked parcels are routinely left along with the letters.
Why the managers are deciding to give senders like HMPO a Special Delivery guaranteed service for a Tracked price is beyond me. It's probably why we're still losing money. The company must be spending millions sending people out on overtime with two or three missed Tracked items that probably cost less than £3 each to post just to get the figures up by half a percent, while all the time thousands of normal letters sit in frames and in trays undelivered for a week or more.
We could easily deliver the USO mail to the required standards if they made that a priority.
I see a member of the Greeting Card Association isn't happy that they have to pay the extra for Tracked to get their items delivered on time.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/01/22/royal-mail-risks-terminal-decline-warn-card-makers/
Ho hum.
I thought the 20 minutes at the end was a national thing already. We've had it for at least ten years.
Isleworth - it's something you can take advantage of of you so wish.
It's against the law to have breaks at the beginning or end of a duty so if your contract says 40 minutes it means you can still have that and get the 20 minutes at the end as a bonus. I did that for years.
Mike - "those customers have no alternate option"
They have thousands of options. When ordering stuff you don't have to get it sent to your home address. It can go to any address you want, it can go to your place of work or a neighbour, it can often go to a Post Office, you can sometimed elect to collect from the RM Delivery Office before delivery is attempted although most are only open 2 hours a day now which is useless).
Many people have 'safe places' such as parcel boxes, sheds etc which can now be registered with RM and the postie gets a message when attempting delivery. That depends on the receiver being proactive though and not many are although a regular postie on a set route gets to know people's preferences anyway.
Even if the first delivery attempt is unsuccessful the receiver can notify RM as to what to do on the second attempt.
RM say they have a 95% success rate at actually delivering items rather than having to leave a card and store the item. It's only that 5% where lockers may be the answer.
It's not correct that most other European countries only deliver three days a week as part of their USO.
Germany and France are six days a week, many others like Italy, Spain and The Netherlands are five days a week.
I think I read somewhere on here about scrapping the USO entirely. Good luck with that, you'd have to convince the United Nations as every country in the world is subject to Universal Postal Union rules which include a nominated universal service provider. Doesn't have to be six days a week but there must be one and clearly no other company in the UK wants that burden so we're stuck with it.
I've long been in favour of five days for Royal Mail but even that won't lead to the company hitting its targets these days. I was on a round last week that had parts with three weeks worth of mail in the frame. The managers at our place haven't got the sense to rotate rounds, they just let them pile up. The one I'm on tomorrow currently has two weeks backlog and I'm just one part-timer covering for two full-timers so I'm not gonna clear any of the backlog.
Glad to see Ofcom mention it's the COM's that are the issue. Maybe the fine can come out of their wages as it's them who've caused it by almost doubling the size of the rounds and telling us to priotitise Tracked.
Horizon has nothing to do with Royal Mail and it wasn't a data protection issue or leak. It was the Post Office (knowingly) using dodgy Fujitsu accounting software and then covering it up for years with hundreds of cases still unresolved financially and, sadly, the cause of some suicides and hundreds of shattered lives. If it matters that much to you, and I can understand if it does, then you would avoid Post Offices entirely and get your postage direct from Royal Mail or your local Sainsburys / Tesco / wherever you shop. By buying postage from the Post Office they get commission - buy it direct from Royal Mail and the PO don't get a penny.
You don't even need to buy stamps these days. You can pay for the postage online via royalmail.com and print off your own label. You can post these items anywhere. If you haven't got a printer you can be sent a barcode instead, take the item to a Royal Mail depot and they'll print the label for you or you can even get Royal Mail to pick the item up from your address free of charge, again, either print your own label or the postie can bring a label with them.
If you really don't want to do this online I can understand your concerns. I'm not a fan of giving all my info to everyone either, so much so that I will often put in false email addresses and phone numbers when ordering stuff online as they really don't need that info to execute delivery and I don't need an update every couple of hours telling me where my item is or endless emails from companies that I bought something from once that I won't need again for years such as buying a sofa and then getting an email every six months asking if I want another. Pointless.
So yeah, I get your concerns but it really is Post Office / supermarket or Royal Mail .
fair play to you posting events that have happened in the past few days six months ago. mystic meg could take some lessons from you.
no, i don't do this professionally. i'm a postie, sound engineer and help run my local football club. proper jobs - not sitting on my **** gambling on shares. 'investors' are as much use to society as the punters outside ladbrokes with a rollie hanging out of their gob.
if you had any idea at what i was getting at, rm's sundays are also unprofitable. unlike fedex the board are doing nothing about it. there is no demand, i work sundays and every single week i get remarks from people saying they weren't expecting stuff to be delivered on a sunday, or they're not in to receive it so we redeliver on monday.
where i work people from london who've moved to a better area are always complaining that amazon logistics don't do sunday deliveries around here(i assume it's unprofitable as it's semi-rural). dpd are always out and about but they're the only other company i see.
shareholders should be putting pressure on the board to stop unprofitable services. at its most extreme i've been paid for an hour at sunday rates to deliver one small tracked item. which probably cost about £3 to send. the manager we have in on sundays just want's his figures to look good rather than make money for the company. it's a terrible state of affairs.
All sorts going on at FedEx.
They're grounding aircraft in the US, reducing their fleet by 29 this year on top of the 18 retired last year.
https://www.aircargonews.net/sectors/express/fedex-to-ground-more-planes-as-profits-come-under-pressure/
They're stopping Sunday deliveries as it's unprofitable.
https://www.reuters.com/business/fedex-trim-more-sunday-deliveries-insider-2023-01-10/
And now they're being accused of the biggest odometer fraud in US history.
https://www.ktnv.com/13-investigates/fedex-sold-thousands-of-vehicles-with-replaced-odometers-class-action-lawsuit-alleges
The US market is struggling at the moment (GLS aren't immune) and I have no idea how much this will impact FedEx UK but it's an interesting time in the segment.
Newdealz - "Lets face postmen arent the sharpest tools in the tool box"
Ha ha. You're illiterate and you say posties aren't the sharpest. People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.
Unlike you, we're able to read and write. Some of us have sold their businesses for more money than you'll see in your lifetime and are just keeping themselves busy by working for RM a couple of days a week.
Some of us have second jobs that can pay more in one night than RM pay in a week. This is just a top-up.
Some of us are intelligent enough to not come on here to argue with trolls and know-nothings. (I'm clearly not in that camp).
Dowsie - Evri are changing (thanks to union involvement - the GMB in their case). They have to in order to retain drivers.
Their last annual report said "are making further enhancements to our self-employed plus (SE+) courier model. This is
the UK’s only union backed self-employed courier network, which provides paid holidays and guaranteed national minimum wage. In March 2022, we announced that this model will be enhanced further, to provide additional benefits such as pensions, sickness pay and parental leave."
Minimum wage is now £10.42 an hour for those over 23, RM currently pay £12.62 an hour. Evri say some drivers get £15 an hour but, like RM, you have to take these announcements with a pinch of salt - just ask the Evri workers and they have just as many gripes as the RM workers.
Their latest report says volumes dropped by 6% in H1 22, RM aren't alone in experiencing lower volumes this year.
Bringing Yodel into this conversation, they're privately owned and backed by billionaires who's annual figures aren't very up to date. They've made a profit once, ever, during the pandemic, They may announce some more recent figures soon and they may well show them as profitable again but, if volumes are dropping across the board, that's probably just a blip as well. It makes no sense to try and compete with such companies whose owners are prepared to shell out hundreds of millions of their own money, for what purposes I don't know.
Regarding the future, if RM bring in a hybrid of wages plus x amount per parcel delivered I'd be very interested in that, but it depends on which area you're delivering to. Where I go on Sundays, sometimes it takes over 20 minutes to do one parcel due to the rural nature of some of our area. It's not efficient and the likes of Amazon certainly won't go there for one parcel, especially on a Sunday but our managers are more concerned with % deliveries attempted rather than is it profitable.
Monday to Saturday not a problem as we're going everywhere anyway, Sundays, well last week it took me 128 minutes to deliver 15 parcels in a rural area. That's what - £3 per parcel? Most of them cost less than that to send. And it's something we don't have to do on Sundays. trying to convince the manager is pointless so I just go along with it.
It's not always the posties that are the ones who can't be flexible.
Sorry for the long post again.
I must apologise - I was looking at revenue rather than volume for RM. We deliver around 4 million parcels a day - still bigger than the competition.
(I must correct 'facts' that are proven to be wrong!)
Pauly - "As I've stated before, the average age of a RM employee is 55."
Got a source for that? The only info I can find shows it's in the low to mid 40's but that's old data from when we had 150,000 staff. I suspect it could even be lower now as older people have retired or taken VR.
'It's all Amazon and Evri at ours now' Fact.
Maybe for that one house. Across the UK Evri claim to deliver 'over 2 million parcels a day'. Today's figures show RM do over 11 million a day.
As for Amazon - hard to say. They deliver their own stuff apart from the new builds their mapping system can't cope with and rural deliveries where they'll make a loss which they pass on to us.
How many external contracts have they got? Genuine question as I don't know. Looking online reveals a couple of small companies I've never heard of. The only major contract I know they bid for and lost was for delivering test kits after the initial period of the government using them and RM to deliver them.
Pitney Bowes' parcel tracker estimates Amazon Logistics deliver 1.5 times the amount Evri do, so that's 3-4 million a day.
Both combined deliver less than Royal Mail (for now!).
Don't use the word 'fact' when it's not.
Compulsory redundancies. Lol.
My office has recalled people who recently transferred to other offices and hired more agency staff in the past two weeks.
They 'absorbed' twenty of our eighty walks and they still haven't got enough staff to cover them all. A quarter of our workforce have taken the advice those not in the know on this board suggested and have left, along with a couple of retirements and a death in service.
Speaking to posties and managers at other offices who I know they're all in the same boat.
Every time an area gets a mention in its local press about delays and deliveries every two weeks RM says there are 'resourcing issues' (read - not enough staff).
My office doesn't appear on the list of failing offices, although two local to me have been on it every day for a couple of weeks and another was on it for a while a few weeks ago. We're in a state - they're in a right state!
There ain't gonna be any compulsory redundancies in these parts.
Ofcom are gonna fine RM for breaking the USO. I don't know what sort of share holder thinks the solution is to sack even more staff so the fines continue, and probably grow.
You can call the workforce as many names as you like. Doesn't alter the fact that you don't know what you're talking about.
Don't base your views on what the papers tell you to think or what people inside and outside the company post on here.
Everyone is an individual.
All posties / teachers / train drivers / nurses / whatever are lazy, militants is akin to saying all police officers are sexual abusers.
Some are. Most aren't.
No strikes in Q4 yet Q of S is even lower than Q1, the last quarter with no strikes.
I wonder why that is? - Despite Anger's denials, goodwill has always existed in Royal Mail and it's now gone. People would be willing to go the extra mile, during the pandemic really showed that, now - no chance. You should see the (mainly young) agency staff we get in - they put in even less effort than the contracted workers. They bring back loads of parcels and just leave them in the van for the postie to find the following day when he's about to load up for the day.
Q of S figures won't be improving in my area much in the forseeable future. Just not enough staff.
Broch - "Every office files a DODR repor"
How many managers are truthful on the DODR's though?
I know in my previous office the manager lied saying things were cleared when they weren't and that was nine or ten years ago.
In my current office the manager says he doesn't lie on the DODR but he knows plenty of other local offices do.
Darbo - "this is still the king's mail".
You do realise RM was fully privatised in 2015. The state, whether that be the Government or the Crown, have no ownership or control of the mail. It's in the Postal Services Act 2011.
If it was the king's mail then surely he would have given us the day off last Saturday?