The delivery of letters went worse again last year than the year before. Only 86 percent of the mail arrived on time in 2024. PostNL has thus failed to meet the legal target for the sixth year in a row.
This is according to the Post and Parcel Monitor that the Netherlands Authority for Consumers & Markets (ACM) released on Thursday.
PostNL must deliver 95 percent of letters to the correct location within 24 hours. But where that almost succeeded in 2020 with a percentage of 94.3 percent, that has now fallen to 86.0 percent.
The decline has been particularly sharp in the last three years, with a loss of 8 percentage points. As a result, 14 percent of letters now arrive too late or not at all at their destination. That is one in seven pieces of mail.
The declining quality of delivery is also evident from the fact that the ACM receives more complaints. “More and more signals are about mail that arrives much too late or not at all,” says the regulator.
Declining quality of mail delivery not the only problem for PostNL
This is not the only problem that PostNL has. The company is also struggling with a declining number of letters. Where the postal company still had to process 2.03 billion letters in 2020, that was only 1.56 billion last year. That means a decrease of almost a quarter in four years.
And as if that weren’t enough, it was announced late last month that PostNL may face competition. Spotta, a deliverer of advertising leaflets, also wants to focus on the market for addressed mail in the future. The company has therefore registered with the ACM.
Yet it is not all doom and gloom for PostNL. In addition to letters, the company also delivers many packages. That is a growing market, with an increase of more than 2 percent last year to 605 million packages.
The number of international packages is particularly on the rise. This is probably due to the growing popularity of Chinese webshops such as Temu and AliExpress.