It’s a bleak picture painted by many postal services, and now the Canada Post is bleeding money, too. It recorded a loss of $550 in 2023, with the future up in the air. According to local newspapers, it’s not the first time the postal service has been waving red flags.
It’s the service’s sixth consecutive year in financial trouble. Competition in the delivery space has grown, and postal services worldwide are battling to keep up with technology.
Mail deliveries have declined by over 50% over the last 20 years. Canada Post CEO Dough Ettinger has acknowledged that their business model “must change.”
“An operating model designed to deliver nearly 5.5 billion letters in 2006 cannot be sustained on the 2.2 billion letters we delivered last year. This trend is not unique to Canada,” says Ettinger.
Australia Post
This problem is not unique to the Canadian postal company.
In August, the Australia Post suffered a historic blow to its letter business. It dipped $384.1 million into the red.
The AusPost lost $200 million before tax, the second time since turning into a self-funded government business enterprise around 34 years ago.
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Australia Post believes further losses are expected unless it can secure the “necessary support required to modernize its business.”
In March, things started looking up for AusPost, with the help of its modernization strategy, to improve its financial performance. The company is still in the “early stages of modernization” but hopes to see more changes over the next year or beyond.
USPS reports a decline in net losses
Earlier this month, the United States Postal Service (USPS) announced its net loss for quarter two had been reduced by $1 billion to $1.5 billion compared to the same quarter in 2023.
The total operating revenue has increased by $410 million. A whopping $1.4 billion of the losses were “uncontrollable.” Parcel and Postal Technology International reports that this could be attributed to the postal services’ efforts to transform and modernize.
According to USPS, the financial update shows positive trends due to the implementation of its 10-year transformation and modernization plan.
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About the author
Mia is a multi-award-winning journalist. She has more than 14 years of experience in mainstream media. She's covered many historic moments that happened in Africa and internationally. She has a strong focus on human interest stories, to bring her readers and viewers closer to the topics at hand.
