Turquoise? Mole? The Marianne stamp could well show off a new color in 2022, being added to the red of the priority letters issued the next day and to the green for the folds of the day after. The government, in fact, announced Thursday, July 22 that La Poste would “Prepare a new range by 2023, centered on a D + 3 offer”.
This decision, disseminated at the end of a high-level monitoring committee of the works contract between the State and La Poste, chaired by the Prime Minister, Jean Castex, is part of a package of measures intended to take into account the dramatic attrition of the mail. The trend erosion of volumes, which began in 2008, has tripled during the crisis due to Covid-19, according to the report on “Changes in the universal postal service” by Jean Launay, former member of the Lot commissioned in February by the Minister of the Economy and Finance, Bruno Le Maire.
As a result, this loss-making activity since 2018 generated a record loss of € 1.3 billion for La Poste in 2020. For a long time, the operator argued that the situation was unsustainable and even risked endangering its competitive activities, banking or digital, by depriving them of resources. He asked the State to compensate for part of its losses on mail and to allow it to adapt its system.
Mail, this loss-making activity since 2018, generated in 2020 a record loss of 1.3 billion euros for La Poste
The distribution of mail and parcels 6 days a week throughout France is in fact a public service mission. Until now, La Poste was compensated for its other missions – press distribution, land use planning, banking accessibility – but not for mail. Mr. Castex has ruled. He accepted the principle of compensation for the universal postal service. The envelope was set at 500 million euros per year in the form of a budgetary allocation paid from 2021, once the aid has been approved by the European Commission. In addition, La Poste could receive up to 20 million euros depending on its quality of service.
Not enough to fill, however, the structural losses of the universal postal service, estimated at around 900 million euros per year by 2025, according to projections in the Launay report. The cause: oversized logistics compared to household and business uses, in the age of emails, electronic signatures and paperless invoices.
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