Postal services worldwide have been actively changing in the past decade. International letter delivery dropped by just under 14 percent between 2019 and 2020 after steadily decreasing since 2011. In contrast, the parcel market has been booming. Its growth was accelerated by the hike in e-commerce sales worldwide due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Swiss postal services mirror the trends observed in the global market and neighboring countries. Some three billion letters were delivered in Switzerland in 2021 and remained strong in 2022. Despite this, the overall volume constituted a decrease of 100 million year-over-year and 22 percent compared to 2014. In contrast, parcel deliveries increased by ten percent year-over-year, up to 329 million packages. Swiss Post—a public company owned by the Swiss Confederation and Switzerland’s national postal service—delivered some 1.7 billion addressed letters and 194 million parcels in 2022, making it the postal service market leader in Switzerland.
Swiss Post employed more people in 2022 than 2021—continuing the rise in employment increase since 2020 despite staff costs dropping by six percent year-over-year to 3.5 billion Swiss francs in 2022. This cost decrease was partly due to the company discontinuing staff vouchers for retirees. One of the other factors enabling the company to boost its financial performance in 2022 was its ability to maintain stable customer satisfaction across the whole group.
Logistics Services Spearhead Pandemic Recovery
Swiss Post generated 6.9 billion Swiss francs in operating income in 2022 (around 7.5 billion U.S. dollars), up five percent compared to 2020 and only measuring a slight decrease compared to 2021. With operating expenses also rising after a dip at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Swiss Post reported some 358 million Swiss francs in 2022 operating profit (approximately 397.3 million U.S. dollars). The group’s logistics services and PostFinance —its financial services subsidiary—were its most profitable segments, reporting 358 million and 229 million Swiss francs in operating profit in 2022 (397 million and 254 million U.S. dollars). In contrast, its communication services and PostalNetwork recorded a loss that year, though the number of PostalNetwork’s access points rose to over 4,800.Swiss Post employed more people in 2022 than 2021—continuing the rise in employment increase since 2020 despite staff costs dropping by six percent year-over-year to 3.5 billion Swiss francs in 2022. This cost decrease was partly due to the company discontinuing staff vouchers for retirees. One of the other factors enabling the company to boost its financial performance in 2022 was its ability to maintain stable customer satisfaction across the whole group.
