Not enough market support stamped out the prospects for the Zumbox joint-venture digital mail service forcing the essential mail company to close the operation.
The venture to augment Computershare’s large print-based essential mail service ran into trouble as sufficient corporate clients failed to become enthused. After fighting off a trademark dispute with rival Australia Post’s MyPost, the 1,000 companies and 12,000 registered consumers it attracted were not sufficient to deliver critical mass.
The closure however is not a vote in favour of traditional mail with David Hynes, chairman of Digital Post Australia, claiming that corporations are developing their own digital services.
In a statement to Print 21 he said; Despite corporate senders being initially very excited by the concept, many seem to be focusing their digital strategies on the development of their own customer communication platforms and therefore the number of companies committed to delivering mail through the channel wasn’t sufficient to make it a sustainable service.…Despite our traditional mail volumes declining much less than industry averages, we have seen a significant increase in clients using our digital communication channels.
Digital Post Box users have until 31 July 2014 to download any documents they’d like to keep.
Meanwhile Australia Post claims its opposition service, MyPost Digital Mailbox, is going from strength to strength despite having far less users. According to an Australia Post spokesperson, the expectation is that the service will continue to expand. We’ve been really pleased with how customers have embraced the Digital Mailbox since its launch last year. In June alone there were an average of 2000 new registrations per day.
We are proud to be partnering with some of Australia’s largest companies including Telstra AMP, Westpac and Velocity Frequent Flyer, and with more than 30 providers on-board, and another 20 coming on-board by the end of the year, the MyPost Digital Mailbox is well positioned to deliver.
The operational rationale behind the two ventures is the offer of a secure internet service for paying and receiving bills and filtering spam. In effect they are promoting a private internet where people pay to access normal services in a monitored environment.
The developments come as letter volumes and revenue continue to fall off a cliff, encouraging Australia Post to look at cutting 900 staff and reducing the frequency of deliveries. According to Ahmed Fahour, CEO, a Boston Consulting Group report, Australian and International Postal Services Overview, provides ample justification for radically changing the country’s postal service.
“Australians have fundamentally changed the way they communicate as they embrace digital technology which, as this report confirms, has resulted in a dramatic and irreversible decline in letter volumes," said Fahour.
The report declares that with letter volumes falling by 11.4 % per annum until 2020 this will cause a $12.1 billion loss for the letters business and $6.6 billion for Australia Post overall over ten years to 2023. It challenges the need for daily mail deliveries stating only one-third of receivers use their mail directly on the day they receive it and that half would accept three-day delivery with very few willing to pay to maintain the status quo.
A similar situation in New Zealand has seen letter volumes decline at an average rate of 5.8% from 2008 to 2012. Despite having 20 competitive post operators in the liberalised market, the price of a standard letter rose to 50 cents in 2007, 60 cents in 2010, and 70 cents in 2012, with a further rise to 80 cents planned in July of this year. NZ Post delivers six days a week but from June 2015 that will drop to a minimum of three per week as it grapples with falling revenues.