UK Mail profits soar on parcel deliveries

[TrueBlueTerrier]

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The boom in online shopping has boosted parcel deliveries at Midlands-based Royal Mail rival UK Mail, sending its profits soaring by 63% to £11.9 million, it revealed today. At the same time the company revealed a slight dip in its letter deliveries.

Unveiling its half year figures, UK Mail said its parcel business was up 21.4% on the same point a year ago, largely driven by an increase in home deliveries from online shopping.

But mail revenues were down 0.3%, although profits were up across both sides of the business. Overall revenue was up 7.9% to 243.4m.

Based in Birmingham, UK Mail is having to move its hub in the city to make way for the HS2 rail scheme.

Chief executive Guy Buswell, said: “This has been a period of very strong growth, driven particularly by strong increases in our parcels volumes. Trading to date in the second half has been in line with our expectations and we remain confident of a positive outcome for the full year.

“This strong performance reflects the excellent progress made over the past three years.

“We are now entering the next phase of strategic investment. With significant steps forward planned over the next two years in our capacity, customer-facing technology, IT infrastructure and automation, these investments will create the platform for the next chapter of growth for the group over the coming years.”

[Lounge Lizard]

The UK Mail boss on BBC Radio 4's Today programme this morning said that he was one of Royal Mail's biggest customers, giving us 13 million letters a day to deliver, and that we did a good job at that. No hint of any intention to do some 'end to end' deliveries like TNT but he did hope to negotiate a better price for DSA from Royal Mail ( presumably based on us having lower wages post privatisation)