EVRi to start delivering letters?

[TopperGas]

Royal Mail recently announced they were increasing prices for 'downstream access operators' who collect and pre-sort mail before handing it over to Royal Mail for final delivery. They were increasing rates by up to thirty six percent for access business mail and economy letters which includes bank statements, NHS letters and utility bills.

The operators such as Whistl, Citipost and UK Mail were outraged, complained to Offcom and there has now been a freeze in any potential changes until Ofcom decides whether it is permissible or not.

It could possibly be coincidental after these events and was always planned but now Evri are consulting the GMB Union about a new product in letters. Evri was recently bought by DHL meaning the two are merged. Conveniently DHL owns UKMail which is one of the downstream operators that use the Royal Mail network for the delivery of their bulk post.

Uk Mail collects and processes over 1 billion letters! Royal mail currently delivers between 6.6 billion to 6.7 billion letters a year.

We don't yet know what Evri/DHLs plans are. It seems unthinkable that UKmail will undercut Royal Mail and use its own delivery operator Evri to deliver these letters. How this would function does not seem feasible. However, in the UK in 2026 anything can happen. If they can do it cheap, then they will, regardless of the consequences.

A billion letters is a substantial amount of revenue taken from royal mail. How many of these billion letters they intend to deliver themselves is not clear. Interesting times ahead!

For years third party companies were happy to take letters from firms, charging a premium price and dump it on Royal Mail and pay pennies while pocketing the difference, they're outraged because they're going to lose money, we SHOULD have charged them FULL price from the very start, we wouldn't be losing money and RM position would have been more secure, we wouldn't have been privatised certainly as the income stream goes straight to the treasury.

If EVRi can guarantee to deliver Radio Times at the start of each week then I doubt they'll need to undercut RM to win the business?

[yubin282]

Didn't someone else try this about 15 years ago ? and unsurprisingly it went tits up.

Yep, and they ended up in bins and rivers.

They’d have to recruit people than can read English.