e-commerce drives ‘strongest quarterly volume growth ever’ at bpost

CEO

bpost has reported its Q2 2016, with an operating revenue of €591.9m for the period. This represents a fall of 1.0% compared with the same period for 2015. EBITDA also saw a slight year-on-year fall, down by 0.3% to €159.4m.

bpost’s CEO, Koen Van Gerven, commented, “Thanks to excellent growth in parcels and resilient domestic mail, we managed to fully compensate the impact of the reduction in SGEI compensation on our profitability”.

Domestic mail volume was down by 6.1% compared with the same period in 2015, which was reflected by the segment’s fall in revenues of 2.1% to €356.3m.

The company’s Parcels division saw a year-on-year increase in revenue, up 8.9% on Q2 2015 to €88.4m. This increase was driven by “the strongest quarterly volume growth ever” of 18.3% in domestic parcel volumes, which itself was a result of an increase in e-commerce, as well as a continued positive trend in C2C.

Revenue from international parcels was also up, by €1.8m on the previous year, representing growth of 4.6%. However, this figure was impacted by lower volumes to and from China. bpost stated that international parcels were mainly impacted by “the positive contribution of the acquisition strategy.”

The company’s CEO commented added, “We are on track to realise our outlook for this year and expect to be able to realise at least the same result and dividend as last year.”

Source: bpost