This is not a fold, the La Poste group must renew itself and innovate.
With 250,000 employees, the second largest public employer behind the State sees its historic activity, the mail, irremediably decline.
A trend that the Covid crisis has only confirmed.
In 2010, a French family still sent on average about fifty urgent letters per year.
Since then, the dematerialization of exchanges and new habits have brought this number down to five.
We write less, we write less, but what could be more logical in the age of e-mail and dematerialized bank statements?
In twelve years, mail delivery in France has plummeted by nearly 60%.
And the projections leave little hope that the curve will be reversed.
In this context, on February 27, Philippe Wahl, CEO of La Poste, hit the nail on the head.
At the microphone of France Inter, confirming what he had declared a few days earlier to deputies, the boss of postal workers indicated that his group was considering the removal of the red stamp, which guarantees mail delivery the next day (J + 1).
A cultural revolution for a group whose logistical and technical organization has been built in recent decades on the pride and the ability to deliver postal items from one end of France to the other in 24 hours thanks to the road. , the railroad or the plane.
“We must ask the question of the D + 1, continued Philippe Wahl.
[...] Is it still useful, when we have everything we need as an urgent means of communication, to keep a red letter?
"
If the reform is completed, mail will continue to be delivered in France but without the obligation, the constraints and the logistics of bringing it the next day in the 34 million letterboxes.
The green stamp would remain for non-urgent letters.
As for individuals and businesses wishing to send mail within 24 hours, they would have recourse to special services.
Obviously more expensive.
"The management tries to sell us a letter by Chronopost or a letter followed when it was precisely the subject of the red stamp", squeaks a postman from the east of Paris.
500 million euros of turnover which disappears every year
An artifice that can no longer last.
Especially since it is no longer effective in this period when the health crisis has accelerated the process and the losses.
“We have experienced three years of decline in one, summarizes a framework about 2020. Today, it is 500 million euros in turnover that disappear each year with the mail.
That can not continue.
"
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“The D + 1, which is part of the universal postal service, should not be subject to accounting rules.
Profitability is valid when there are shareholders at the end, ”insists Irène Baudry, elected CGT to the board of directors.
The union representative fears that the withdrawal of the red stamp is a prelude to “unraveling the organization and logistics of the mail”.
“We want to put aside what doesn't look pretty.
The courier suddenly became the ugly lame duck, ”laments the elected official, attached to the role of public mail service.
According to her, "postal workers are proud to be able to deliver in D + 1 thanks to their organization".
Above all, Irène Baudry criticizes the speech of her management which makes mail "the ideal culprit who takes all the wrong shots".
"It is expensive to distribute letters, admits a postman from Val-de-Marne, but it is a service rendered to the population".
A service against which the State retrocedes compensation, but not "sufficient", complains the CEO, Philippe Wahl.
In 2020, 1.1 billion euros of loss for La Poste on the side of letters ... "What we are asking the State is to compensate for the constraints of the public service missions that it puts to our charge."
Philippe Wahl @ GroupeLaPoste. # Narretepasleco @franceinter pic.twitter.com/srSSQdUyKA
- Alexandra Bensaid (@Alex_Bensaid) February 27, 2021
Formerly flourishing, the mail branch now weighs a heavy burden in the accounts.
Without the inclusion in the balance sheet of CNP Assurances' results, La Poste would present a scarlet red balance sheet for 2020 with a deficit of 1.8 billion euros.
Between 2013 and 2019, 4.2 billion euros did not go into the coffers due to the attrition of the mail market.
"For the first time in fifteen years, we have lost money", acknowledged Philippe Wahl in front of parliamentarians.
The first confinement left traces
A situation which can not last any longer and which worries the State, unwilling to see the Post office sink into the spiral of debt, like the SNCF.
Two reports should soon be submitted to the Ministry of the Economy and to Parliament on the future outlines of La Poste's public service missions.
There is no doubt that they will come back to the organizational difficulties of the group that the fiasco of the first confinement last spring brought to light.
The agencies had to operate part-time for seven weeks.
Despite this, the payment of social benefits, one of the big missions, had finally been able to proceed correctly.
To get by, La Poste has no other choice than to turn to other activities.
Parcels, services and the banking sector are now the new horizon.
Without succeeding in compensating for the collapse of mail, the parcel activity is surfing on a pretty dynamic and an international development (Germany, Brazil, England, Italy) which now makes La Poste a major player in the sector with its subsidiary GeoPost .
The Covid and the boom in electronic commerce have brought nearly 100 million additional packages to sorting lines.