Its CEO, Philippe Wahl, makes no secret of it: for La Poste, 2023 was a year “particularly difficult”, between cost inflation, slowdown in consumption and difficulties in the real estate market. The annual results published Thursday February 29 are affected by this. The year 2023 led the group to take stock of a ten-year phase devoted to growth and diversification in order to draw the consequences, sometimes painful.
Despite the 49% drop in annual net profit, to 514 million euros, for a turnover of 34.1 billion (+ 2.4%), there is no question of changing course, assures M .Wahl. The priority remains to make La Poste “much less vulnerable to mail”, historical activity, in regular and inevitable decline. In 2023, La Poste actually distributed 6.1 million letters, or 9.2% less than in 2022. The drop is a little less steep (− 4.6%) for turnover, l company having raised its prices by 5.3% last year.
Under these conditions, the group is retrospectively pleased to have removed, at the beginning of 2023, the “red letter”, which guaranteed delivery within twenty-four hours: criticized, at the time, internally and externally. company, this choice made it possible to save around a hundred million euros.
Slowdown of the Mediaposte subsidiary
The fact remains that the decline of mail has caused the group to lose more than 6 billion euros in revenue in ten years, recalls the CEO. A shortfall than the 500 million euros paid each year by the State for the public service missions entrusted to the group (universal postal service, maintenance of a network of 17,000 “contact points”, banking accessibility and press distribution) cannot compensate.
And La Poste must now resist another setback, that suffered by the subsidiary Mediaposte, specializing in the distribution of advertising printed matter.
The experiment in fourteen zones of French territory and for three years of the “Yes pub”, which prohibits the distribution of advertising leaflets if the authorization to receive them is not visibly indicated on the mailbox, has destabilized the subsidiary, whose turnover fell by 10% in 2023. Now making a loss, Mediaposte is refocusing on digital marketing, and 4,900 of its 5,500 employees have been transferred to La Poste.
Faced with these two headwinds, the group has focused heavily on parcel distribution, an activity which now represents more than half of total turnover. But if the exceptional growth of the Covid-19 period was followed by a logical decline in 2022, the machine remained stuck last year, with the slowdown in consumption and inflation: at 2.1 billion units, the volumes of parcels delivered by Geopost, the specialized subsidiary, and by Colissimo have stagnated.
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