Lessons from the postal sector to telecommunications and vice versa

Abstract

The arrival and diffusion of the commercial Internet has been one of the main causes of change in the postal sector in the last two decades. Its impact has been rapid and it has gone straight to the core of postal operators’ (POs’) activities: the mail business. Electronic communications, especially email, available at zero marginal cost and relatively high quality, have quickly changed consumers’ and businesses’ communicating habits, leading to substitution away from traditional physical mails. Although substantial postal volumes remain, for reasons that will later be discussed, it has certainly hit the sector’s volume and profitability dramatically…