Network connects 120 cities
Similar to its Belgian and Dutch equivalents, Deutsche Post is struggling to deal with a fast-shrinking postal service and also similar to bpost and PostNL, it wants to counter that turnover drop by getting onto the package delivery market. The company will now launch a pilot to send online orders onto the intercity buses of its subsidiary, Postbus, which currently connects the 120 largest German cities.
The service is positioned in between its own (slower) delivery network and the faster services from its subsidiary DHL. “Business customers will get a cheaper option, while consumers can choose to get more speedy deliveries”, package director Jürgen Gerdes told Bloomberg. The formerly state-owned postal service hopes it can now compete with Google and Amazon’s own package delivery services.
The plan is part of a series of experiments designed to help grow the operational profit in the package delivery branch by 3 % per year until 2020. Coincidentally, Amazon filed a patent for a similar idea in the United States recently.
