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Danish postal service continues to lose money, but closer to breaking even

The Danish arm of the PostNord company is still loss-making but has come closer to profit during 2019.

Published: 25 October 2019 10:03 CEST
Danish postal service continues to lose money, but closer to breaking even
File photo: Mads Claus Rasmussen/Ritzau Scanpix

The first nine months of 2019 have returned a loss of 80 million kroner, Ritzau writes.

That represents an improvement on the 307 million kroner loss in the same period last year, according to company results released on Friday.

PostNord’s total operations in Denmark, Norway, Finland and Sweden have resulted in an operational profit of 251 million kroner, compared to a 50 million korner loss for the same period in 2018.

Recent years have seen the company struggle to cope with huge falls in the volume of letters being sent, as digitalization has gradually taken over much of the post’s traditional functions.

PostNord took over Denmark’s post distribution after the partial privatization and selling off of national service Post Danmark.

Today, the company’s primary focus is to deliver parcels, a sector which is in growth due to the advent of online shopping.

Results for the company in Denmark are partly due to a major cost cutting plan implemented last year. Billions of kroner were spent by the company to release thousands of employees.

The company has also cut deliveries, raised prices and closed virtually all of Denmark's post offices over the last decade, replacing them with counters in supermarkets and convenience stores.

The Danish and Swedish states, which are joint owners of PostNord, injected funds to assist the company during the 2018 cost-cutting programme.

An EU commission opened in June this year will investigate whether state support of around two billion kroner from Denmark and Sweden breached EU rules.

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Can you rely on Sweden’s Postnord to deliver cards and presents on time?

Wednesday marks the last day you can send first class letters or parcels in Sweden and still hope they'll make it in time for Christmas Eve. But how reliable is PostNord, the company which runs Sweden's postal service?

Published: 20 December 2022 15:16 CET
Can you rely on Sweden's Postnord to deliver cards and presents on time?

What can you still send and hope for it to be delivered by Christmas? 

The Christmas deadline for letters and parcels outside of Sweden already passed on December 12th, as has the deadline for ordering anything online and hoping for it to arrive on time, with most e-commerce companies advising customers that anything ordered later than December 19th will not arrive in time. 

But if you’re sending first-class letters, pre-paid parcels, and small packages for delivery through the letterbox, you can still send them up until December 21st. The same goes for other parcel services such as Postnord MyPack Home, PostNord MyPack Home small, PostNord MyPack Collect, and Postpaket parcels.  

And if you’re willing to pay a bit extra, you can send express mail letters, express parcels, and first class ‘varubrev’ small parcels up until December 22nd. 

“Those dates still apply. We have written in a press statement that if you send by those dates you can be pretty sure that they will arrive in time,” Anders Porelius, head of press at PostNord, told The Local on Tuesday. 

But can you trust Postnord to deliver when they say they will? 

Not entirely.

The Swedish Post and Telecom Authority, Sweden’s postal regulator, ruled on December 8th that the company was failing to meet its regulatory target of delivering 95 percent of all letters within two working days, with 28 million letters delivered late between June and November. 

An investigative documentary by TV4’s Kalla Fakta (Cold Facts) programme, was sent pictures showing huge piles of late, undelivered letters in one of PostNord’s terminals, and interviewed postal workers who said that they were unable to complete their deliveries now they had been moved from daily to every other day, as they had twice as many letters to deliver on the days when they worked. 

“You get yelled at by the customers, and rightly so, you get yelled at by your bosses, and you scold yourself because you feel like you’re not able to do enough,” said Emilia Leijon, one postal worker. “We pretty much never manage to deliver a whole satchel. There’s too much post and too little time.” 

What is PostNord doing about the delays? 

The Swedish Post and Telecom Authority has given the company until January 30th to carry out an analysis into why it is not managing to meet its targets, and to draw up an action plan of how it is going to improve. 

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