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PostNL expands its capacity in preparation for peak season
It’s no surprise that the coming holidays represent one of the busiest seasons ever for PostNL. In preparation for the expected dizzying increase in the number of parcels, which is expected to be 60 to 70 percent more than at the beginning of this year, the mail and parcel deliverer is planning ahead by expanding its delivery capacity.
Due to the corona crisis, capacity had already been increased by 40 percent. Still, the holidays demand another 20 to 30 percent to be added, according to Liesbeth Kaashoek, PostNL Parcels & Logistics Director, in conversation with NU.nl. The company will rent additional storage locations and transport, and hire extra employees for sorting and delivery. Furthermore, the sorting centers will be fully operational on Sundays to handle the expected high volumes.
Parcel delivery volumes increasing Due to Covid-19, the company noticed a great increase in online shopping among consumers. As a result, the company is benefiting from the boom in online orders, given that both small and medium sized web shops, in particular, made frequent use of PostNL’s parcel delivery service.
“Normally, we have tens of millions parcels to deliver during the holiday season,” says Kaashoek. In the corona era, PostNL delivered around 900,000 parcels daily. Since mid-March, the number has increased to about a million daily and now heads towards one and a half million on peak days.
The magic of the holidays According to Kaashoek, the peak season for parcel delivery starts when Sinterklaas arrives in the Unpluq, a physical-digital key designed to help reduce smartphone addiction, launched on the market by the end of last October. The Dutch startup was created by two TU Delft students who wanted to find a way to spend less time on their phones. The result is a little USB-C stick that locks and unlocks access to the most time-consuming apps on the user’s phone, according to individual needs. Amidst growing awareness of the “Attention Economy” pervasiveness, which promotes technology addiction, and its potential threats to mental health, Unpluq claims that its product can help decrease smartphone use by 25% on average, asserting that “you should control technology, instead of technology controlling you.” Netherlands on 14 November. But although Sinterklaas is the starting signal, this is certainly not the only factor contributing to the increase in deliveries. Shopping events with growing popularity such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday contribute to the crazy season. “We use extra trucks during the peak period, an extra thousand deliverers, and we work 24/7,” says Kaashoek. According to her, PostNL will do everything in its power to get all parcels delivered on time. “The corona crisis has also taught us to work with our customers – the web shops – to see how we can get parcels delivered at the right time.”
More early shopping Online shops will start their ad campaign sooner and spread out their deals and specials as much as possible, so it would be beneficial to start holiday shopping early this year. “It really helps if consumers think about ordering presents on time,” says Kaashoek. “We do everything we can to deliver orders on the agreed day.” As part of its expansion plans, PostNL will be opening three sorting centers, which will contribute to further growth in parcel delivery next year. “Since the outbreak of the corona crisis, we have delivered to more addresses than ever before,” says Kaashoek. “These consumers, who started ordering online for the first time, may not continue to order the same things, but they will continue to buy online.”
No one can predict precisely the number of orders that the holiday season will bring, but the mail and parcel delivery giant remains calm and sure that it will come out on top. As Kaashoek puts it: “It’s an unpredictable period. But we are looking forward to it; it’s also a very nice period that we enjoy.” The startup’s history goes back to the student times of cofounders Tim Smits (production design and hardware) and Jorn Rigter (production design and software), who found that their smartphone use was taking precious time off their studies. When taking a course on entrepreneurship, they decided to tackle the problem of smartphone distraction. That initiative became Unpluq, which launched on crowdfunding platform Kickstarter in February to reach €10.000 in funding. From the working prototype they had at the beginning of the year, they have scaled up to mass production in a few months, and the product has now been available for a few weeks, for €29.95. As reported by De Volkskrant, Smits and Rigter expect to sell 10.000 Unpluq sticks by the end of the year, and have set an even higher bar of 100.000 sales in 2021. The defining characteristic of Unpluq is the conjunction of the software and a physical USB-C stick that acts as the key to lock and unlock access. In other words, a user-defined set of distracting apps can only be accessible with the stick plugged into the smartphone charging port, and the user can choose whether to leave the stick at home, in their car or backpack, or carry it around on a keychain. Thus, gaining access to addicting software like social media, dating apps and news feeds requires the conscious physical choice of inserting the key and “opening the door.” For the time being, Unpluq works only on Android devices, due to iPhone’s restrictions on third-party software modifying the home screen. But the company is already working on an iOS version to be released later on. PostNL in numbers In its report for the third quarter of 2020, the mail and parcel deliverer reported that the continued growth of parcel delivery in the Netherlands and Belgium has increased its profits, and dividend distribution for 2020 will resume.
Nevertheless, the stock exchange showed a negative reaction to the quarterly report: PostNL’s share price fell by more than 6% in the first hour. This is probably because volume growth in parcels leveled off: from 24.8% growth in the second quarter to 16.8% in the third quarter.
The company posted sales of €742 million in the third quarter, an increase of €106 million compared to the same quarter last year. Normalized operating profit (EBIT) increased by €10 million to €36 million, while net income increased from €4 million to €28 million.
TU Delft students develop key to counter smartphone addiction
Written by Bárbara Luque Alanís distraction and overall mental health can be noticeable in our own daily lives. After all, who of us hasn’t noticed an increased dependence on mobile phones with corresponding distraction levels? This is an intrinsic part of an the “Attention Economy”, in which the product to be commercialized is the attention of users, most efficiently harvested by making apps and gadgets increasingly addicting and engaging. One result is a toll on the mental health of smartphone users, specially in younger demographics. Research published in the BMC Psychiatry Journal in 2019 found that 23% of young people have problematic smartphone usage, which can be linked to depression, anxiety, stress, poor sleep quality and overall lower productivity and educational attainment. In the Netherlands, according to a report on global mobile consumer trends by Deloitte, in 2017 80% of the population owned a smartphone; 20% of them checked it more than 50 times a day, and more than 30% checked it within the first 5 minutes of waking up.
Corresponding to this growing problem, a market for distraction-free-experience apps and devices is opening up. Unpluq stands on a middle ground between softwareoriented solutions, like the time and wellbeing setting options already preinstalled in smartphones and available through various apps; and hardware-oriented solutions like minimalist phones with just-essential functionality or physical devices that control access to the smartphone, like safeboxes with timers. Thus, the Delft-based company is betting on a locking solution that is neither too easy to solve, nor too hard to circumvent. It remains to be seen whether it is an appealing one, among all the others options, for people struggling with smartphone addiction.
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