31.10.2018

“According to ANCOM’s Statistical Data Report on postal services in 2017, the revenues from postal services increased by 8% in 2017, amounting to RON 2.8 billion, while the total postal traffic decreased by 1%. Out of the approximately 500 thousand complaints submitted in 2017, 32 thousand were settled by payment of compensatory damages - on average RON 191/complaint”, declared Eduard Lovin, vicepresident of ANCOM.

Postal traffic

94% of the 556 million postal items, were domestic postal items (approximately 522 million). The remaining 6% of the total postal traffic (34 million items) consisted of cross-border items. Domestic traffic dropped 2%, whereas cross-border traffic was up 8%.

Letterpost items (444 million) accounted for 80% of all the postal items processed in 2017, parcels (68 million) - for 12%, while 8% of the items were processed within other postal services: Express items (18 million), direct mail items (17 million), money orders (7 million), items of correspondence and printed matter weighing over 2 kg (2 million).

In the cross-border postal traffic segment, the number of incoming postal items increased by 12%, the number of outgoing items decreased by 7%. This trend may be explained by the growing uptake of e-commerce among Romanian users.

On average, the number of postal items per capita remained constant in 2017, i.e. 28 items/year/inhabitant. Infographic available here.

Value of postal services market

In 2017, the total value of the postal services market was RON 2.8 billion, 8% more compared to the previous year. Revenues from processing domestic items increased by 10%, reaching RON 2 billion (71% of all the revenues in the market), while revenues from cross-border postal items increased by 5%, amounting to RON 0.8 billion.

Considering the total revenues from postal services obtained in 2017, the market leader holds 22% market share, the second largest provider 21%, the third one 13%, while the rest of the providers account for 44% of the revenues in the market.   

Universal service

The traffic generated by services within the scope of universal service in 2017 decreased by 23%, reaching 179 million items (32% of the total postal traffic), i.e. 154 million domestic and 25 million cross-border postal items.

In 2017, the domestic traffic within the scope of universal service kept the declining trend of the previous years, going down 27%. This dynamics is mainly due to the fact that certain providers gave up certain services that are within the scope of universal service, thus the domestic traffic outside the scope of universal service rose 15% in 2017.

The National Company Romanian Post (CNPR) processed 46 million items within the scope of universal service (26% - a quarter of the traffic within the scope of universal service), i.e. 26 million domestic postal items (17% of the traffic within the scope of universal service) and 20 million cross-border postal items (80% of the cross-border traffic outside the scope of universal service).

Complaints regarding postal services

In 2017, the providers reported having received 492 thousand complaints regarding postal services, 16% more than in the previous year. Out of all these complaints, 98 thousand (20%) were deemed grounded by the postal service providers, 32 thousand of them being settled by payment of compensatory damages amounting to RON 6.2 million. Thus, an average such payment amounted to RON 191 in 2017.

The full report on the Romanian postal services market in 2017 is available, in Romanian, here.