ruckus wrote: ↑14 May 2023, 09:18
The future of Royal Mail is in the hands of those at the top and what they choose to focus on.
While the company is private the focus will surely always be on shareholder profit. There seems to be some conflation between being profitable and being competitive. Those terms should be kept separate. You can be competitive and make little to no profit. Royal Mail is so focused on profit it’s causing problems. Twitter is very “competitive” and doesn’t make a profit. Facebook ran for years without any profit. These are billion dollar companies.
Now giving out shares is not an evil and greedy thing per se. It is the original crowd-funding idea. Before shares a business would have to go to friends and family, but more likely the bank and get a loan and the banks had a lot of the power. If a farmer wanted to buy a bigger field, or more chickens, or a larger tractor to compete with another farm and the bank denied the loan then selling shares where you as an individual can own a piece of the business and help that farmer succeed sounds kind of nice. And you get paid a dividend on your shares as a rewards for risking your money in a business that could fail. For example if the new tractor had a fuel leak and set fire to the house and barn, and apart from 60 roast chickens for sale there are now little to no assets to be shared out to the smaller investors.
If the company is run by people who focus on that shareholder profit then the focus is always going to be on how much profit it can make in the next few years – long-term thinking and future planning can be ignored.
If there was a big change of direction at the top where what the company needs to do for the country and how it goes about achieving that was put first as the priority then you may see a difference.
It seems that there is far more money in parcels than letters and so, as the focus is on profit, the company is looking to accommodate parcels first and kick the efficient delivery of letters down the road for discussion another day – the failing USO etc.
If you need to prioritise parcels then it makes sense to look at other parcel companies and mimic what they are doing in an attempt to try to catch up or even overtake them in what services are offered. You would implement things like scanning parcels multiple times so the customer can see what’s happening at every stage. And you could start an auto-redelivery service as a “great for the customer” idea. Then cross your fingers your business grows. The postie doesn’t like it but the company is looking to help customers before us.
It may be that privatisation was a terrible thing for a company that provides a service like letter delivery because while it is still very much needed for the country, if there is no money in it the company will not spend the required amount of money to maintain the service let alone improve it for the current marketplace.
What does the future hold for Royal Mail? Well it could get worse or it could get better. It depends if you are looking, for example, three months, three years, or three decades into the future. In the short to medium term it will most likely get worse – at least while those at the top ignore letters and if they continue to push for parcels and profit. If Royal Mail could defocus on profit and instead look to the quality of service of both letters and parcels and stop being jealous of Fedex, DPD, Evri, UPS, et al. and their “profitable” stream of parcels (using pence per drop and owner-drivers etc. who work late into the night) they could change (back) into a very well respected, durable, dependable, and steadfast part of the UK for years to come.
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