The Romanian postal and courier services market at an all-time high

The turnover of the Romanian postal and courier services market advanced by 12% compared to 2018 and exceeded by almost 112% the 2010 level, reaching 5.3 billion lei in 2019, according to the most recent KeysFin analysis. Moreover, KeysFin analysts maintain their estimate from May last year, that the market growth rate should at least double, and that the turnover of companies offering postal and courier services should exceed the 6.6 billion lei threshold in 2020, due to the increased online demand generated by the Coronavirus pandemics. In the medium term, they estimate a tempering of the annual growth rate to the one recorded in 2019.

“In the last three years, there is more and more debate about the development of the e-commerce and the major contribution it has to the development of the postal and courier services market. However, even though the Romanian e-commerce market has grown steadily in recent years, no innovation or new entry of a digital commerce player has had such a strong echo in the courier market as the migration to online shopping brought by the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic. Thus, if in 2019 we estimated the continuation of the upward trend that we were used to, in the year of the COVID-19 pandemics we expect the market to grow at least twice as fast, thus reaching an all-time high”, said Roxana Popescu, Managing Director of KeysFin, one of the most important providers of business information solutions in Romania.

The postal and courier services market is one of the few where the number of companies has advanced considerably, by 15% compared to 2018 and by approximately 256% from 2010, to just over 2,400 companies in 2019. If for 2019 specialists KeysFin report a 15% increase, for 2020 they estimate a consolidation, due to the impact of the pandemics on small businesses, those without sufficient logistical and financial capabilities. However, it should be noted that the postal and courier market is one of those that grew the most in 2020, along with the pharma, food retail, health&social care, IT&C as well as energy, gas, water, and sanitation distributors.

The net result (computed as the net profit minus the net loss) of postal and courier service providers increased marginally compared to 2018 but was over 318 million lei higher than the loss recorded in 2010, reaching almost 235 million lei in 2019.

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POSTAL AND COURIER SERVICES, THE WINNERS OF THE PANDEMIC

POSTA ROMANA is still the main player in the Romanian postal and courier market, despite the recently announced wave of layoffs. The company, owned by the Romanian state via the Ministry of Communications – 93.5% and by Fondul Proprietatea – 6.5%, reported in 2019 a turnover of almost 1.3 billion lei (23.9% of the total).

FAN COURIER EXPRESS SRL, the leader of the courier segment, continues to gain ground: in 2019, the company with 100% Romanian private capital had a turnover of almost 792 million lei, respectively an advance of over 15% compared to 2018.

As in the previous year, CARGUS SRL (453 million lei turnover, 8.5% of the total) completes the leader board, being followed by the same players from the year before: TNT ROMANIA SRL (351 million lei, 6.6% of the total, company that surpassed DHL in 2018) and DHL INTERNATIONAL ROMANIA SRL (341 million lei, 6.4% of the total). Cumulatively, the top 10 companies generated 76.4% of the national turnover in 2019.

The analysis does not consider the performance of companies such as BRINGO MAGAZIN SRL (indirectly controlled by Carrefour Nederland BV) or GLOVOAPPRO SRL (owned by the Spaniards from Glovoapp23 SL), which declare as main scope of activity NACE codes related to the IT&C sector. According to the latest data provided by the Ministry of Finance, the two companies reported major increases of 215%, to 21.3 million lei (BRINGO) and 97%, to 63.8 million lei (GLOVO), in the first half of 2020 (from the end of 2019).

FOODPANDA RO SRL (owned by the Germans from BRILLANT 1421 GMBH) has as main scope of activity the 4619 NACE code: agents involved in the sale of a variety of goods, and as secondary scopes of activity those related to retail and wholesale trade (NACE codes 4617, 4618, 4711, 4729, 4791) and did not report their 2019 results up to the drafting of this analysis.

THE NEW ERA OF COURIER SERVICES, FUELED BY THE EXPANSION OF DIGITAL TRADE

In 2019, approximately 41,000 employees worked for the local postal and courier companies, 0.7% more than in 2018. For 2020, KeysFin analysts estimate an advance of approximately 10% to approximately 45,000 employees, due to the sharp increase in courier services demand.

Data from the digital consumer goods market shows increases of around 40% for 2020, and the statistics of the most popular search engine in Romania illustrate a 58% increase in Romanians’ searches in the category of online deliveries in 2020 when compared to the previous year, with peaks of 200% in certain periods such as in April.

Thus, the postal and courier services market is intensely preparing via long-term investments, optimizing processes, and increasing scalability, to move to the next phase, in which it will be prepared to support the accelerated development of e-commerce, further enhanced in the last year by the context created around the Coronavirus pandemic.

Note: The KeysFin analysis is based on annual, non-adjusted, aggregated financial data, reported by companies to the Ministry of Finance (at the end of the period) whose main scope of activity is one of the NACE codes of group 53: postal and courier activities. All figures are expressed in lei and the data was extracted at the beginning of 2021.