Tumbling letter volumes forces Aust Post to cut services

 The number of letters being posted is falling by more than five percent per year as the world moves towards emails. This year the volume of letters posted within Australia is expected to fall below 5 billion. Australia is suprisingly the exception to the rest of the developed world by retaining social mail but it is falling off a cliff.

The falloff has prompted Australia Post to announce the closure of 27 post offices around the country in 2011. It is cutting staff numbers, aiming to spend $150 million on redundancies.

The organisation operates under certain Governement restrictions.  It is required to have at least 4,000 outlets, with 2,500  in rural areas. Currently it has 4,414 post offices.

It is all a long way from even a few years ago when Australia Post was a cash cow for the government, coining $500 million profit. The organisation blames email and Facebook for the transition but is blamed by commercial operators for hiking the postage on direct mail campaigns, dealing a blow to the printing industry.

DIrect marketing mail is now the backbone of Australia P{ost's letter operation with most of the volumes coming from Salmat, Computershare and Sema.

The attitude of Australia Post is best seen in its lemming-like rush to the cliff. This year the postal giant decided not to send Christmas cards to its business customers; it opted for emails instead.