Last Mile Brief 01/02/2023: Polish unions angered by competition between state-owned parcel delivery operators

In today's Last Mile Brief, we bring you news of union anger in Poland over competition between two state-owned parcel delivery companies. We also have reports of yet more EV deployment around the world, as well as UPS' Q4 financial results.

Today’s headline story: Polish unions angered by competition between state-owned parcel delivery operators

Unions representing staff at the Polish Post (Poczta Polska) have reportedly appealed to Poland’s Prime Minister to stop the “destructive” competitive rivalry between Poczta Polska and fellow state-owned company Orlen Paczka.

Polish daily newspaper Rzeczpospolita writes that Orlen’s parcel locker network is growing at an “impressive pace”, which has alarmed the Polish Post as it considers parcel delivery as being its domain.

The Polish Post is already having to deal with stiff competition from InPost, DPD, DHL, Allegro and others, with Orlen Paczka also now part of that picture.

Poczta Polska has a wide network of post offices acting as PUDO points, while the company also has a deal with a popular convenience store chain allowing parcels to picked up at local shops around the country. However, it is lagging behind many of its aforementioned competitors in terms of parcel lockers.

Analysis from Marek Różycki of Last Mile Experts:

The situation in which two state controlled companies compete in a very challenging market is probably quite unique to Poland. Orlen has money and fewer legacy issues, other than the remains of the former RUCH S.A. (newspaper distribution network) and the Post has strong unionisation and legacy systems or infrastructure. To date the winners are InPost in the area of parcel lockers and DPD Polska Sp z o.o. for D2D; together they have almost 2/3 of the whole market by value.So what’s solution? In my view, if Orlen could take over the OOH (out of home) segment and use its financial clout to implement state of the art technology and develop the leading open network. This would give access to a shared OOH infrastructure which is likely to be in the region of 17,000 access points and 4,000 parcel lockers by the end of 2023.

This new open network would be a real and direct threat to InPost’s closed network, which is already about 22,000 (mainly APM’s) and also be a life saver for players like FedEx UPS or GLS, who have little or no apm presence and are relatively behind in PUDO’s.

Of course, Polish Post will need to implement plans to refocus on it’s core business and transform, but that will be another topic for us to cover in the future.

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