How many letters do Royal Mail deliver?

[TrueBlueTerrier]

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Due to an unfortunate pricing error, Royal Mail have answered the question “How many letters do Royal Mail deliver?”, revealing that they sell around six million 2nd Class stamps each week.

On Friday, Royal Mail announced their price increases for 2019, raising the price of both 1st and 2nd Class stamps by 3p. This puts the price of a 2nd Class stamp at 61p with the change due to kick in on Monday the 25th of March.

The problem is that the price of a basic stamp is regulated by OfCom and there’s a price cap set back in 2012 but which allows for inflation and the new price exceeded this. The overpriced stamps will only last a week as on the 1st of April the cap is due to rise to 65p and will rise at the rate of inflation for the next five years through to 2024.

In some ways this is a trival error as consumers will be charged more for stamps for just 7 days and only by about a penny per stamp. However rules are rules and OfCom will want to know how the mistake happened.

In order to redeem themselves, Royal Mail will be donating their overcharge to their nominated charity – Action for Children, which helps disadvantaged children across the UK. They expect to donate around £60,000.

As a consumer, whilst you may think it’s a lovely charity, it’s reasonable that you should be able to choose which charity (if any) you donate to and although the per stamp price is a paltry amount if you buy a second class stamp between the 25th of March and the 1st of April you’ll be donating a penny whether you like it or not. Of course, you could delay posting letters and from the 1st of April all your money will go to Royal Mail or you could stock up on stamps before the 25th of March and only pay 58p a stamp.

What’s interesting is that if Royal Mail are to donate around £60,000 that means that they are expecting to sell around six million second class stamps in a week. Letters, whilst declining around 4% each year, still represent some 55% of Royal Mail’s UK revenues according to their 2017-18 annual statement. Letters represented about £4.15 billion revenue with parcel contributing £3.46 billion.

How many letters do Royal Mail deliver
It’s easy to think that in today’s ecommerce world that most of Royal Mail’s business is now parcels and, while parcels are growing their revenue share at around 4%, Royal Mail are still mainly in the business of delivering letters.

So, how many letters do Royal Mail deliver? In the 2017-18 year Royal Mail delivered around 14.4 billion letters and, even including Parcelforce, only around 1.2 billion parcels.

[scribe]

very interesting piece

[Celgar]

Sort of blows RMs forthcoming policy change that they are primarily a parcel delivery company out of the water.

[Lounge Lizard]

"revealing that they sell around six million 2nd Class stamps each week" which is about 26 million a month and that's for 29 million addresses so not quite one 2nd Class stamped letter each month for each address.

[Mr Rush]

"As a consumer [...] you should be able to choose which charity"

What exactly does one consume when donating to a charity? The concept is so pervasive that people write it without thinking.