 Okay, I think we'll go ahead and get started now. I think we still have a few coming inside, but we can get going because I don't want to keep you guys from lunch too long. So I'll call our next set of panelists up on the stage. Again, we're going to be talking about overall visions from our CEOs, from our posts and CC members. And then this afternoon, we dive into the strategies. So we're going to switch topics now. We're going to talk about diversification. We have Semyon Pog from Kazakh Post, Manager Director, Managing Director of International Business. Namkido Mona, CEO of South African Post. Mariela Bousson, CEO of Seychelles Post. And Nermin Hassan, Head of International Cooperation Sector for Egypt Post and the Chairperson for the Postal Union for the Mediterranean. So feel join me in welcoming our panelists this morning. Okay, that's for you. So we're going to talk about diversification this morning and just want to hear a little bit from each of you on your overall vision when it comes to diversification in your post. Semyon, can you talk a little bit about diversification with Kazakh Post? Are you concentrating more on diversifying when it comes to the core business and what you're doing in delivery or completely new competencies? Sure. Well, thank you, Amanda. Well, first of all, thank you very much for the organizers for such an incredible event. It's an absolute pleasure to be here. Just a brief answer to your question. Yes, we're trying to stick to the core businesses that we do but amend with the new business opportunities which and follow the market trends which the, again, commercial market is offering. So my name is Semyon Pog. I'm the Deputy CEO responsible for the International Business at Kazakh Post. Today I'd like to briefly talk about our diversification strategies. So we are a national operator in Kazakhstan. We have the high level of brand recognition because of our physical presence across the country. We are the only operator who is offering the entire coverage of Kazakhstan. We deliver it to the most remote areas in the country. We have almost 3,000 postal branches, over 18,000 employees, 2,000 transportation units and three fulfilling centers. In addition to the standard postal services, we are offering financial and agent services as well. Talking about our Gazpo strategy and I guess that's the general trend across all national operators, we're trying to switch from being the governmental organization and to the commercial market by becoming an integrated financial and the logistic operator, as well as the social partner for the state. When it comes to the social services, we're planning to expand and utilize our existing infrastructure across the country. We want to be one stop shop for the digital and non-digital services in the villages and the cities. We want to become the financial agent of the state programs. We want to perform the online education in the villages and we're going to continue providing the normal or standard postal services like payment of pensions, delivery of correspondence and newspapers and magazines to the remote areas. When it comes to becoming an integrated financial and logistic operator, we would like to offer different ways of payment, financial and insurance services, different types of delivery options, again in response to our customer needs we will provide fulfillment services and E2E logistics and as well as cargo and transit shipments. Talking briefly about financial results and as a confirmation of a success of our strategy, CUSPOS become profitable for the first time in five years this year actually. For eight months in 2023, we managed to increase our revenue by 44%, reduce our expenses by 14.6%, which allowed us to achieve the profit of 5.1 million versus anticipated loss of 23.1 million. Well, having mentioned about what we're planning to do, I'd like to briefly talk about what we're actually accomplishing so far to execute our strategy. Kazakhstan is a huge country. We have a territory of 2.8 million square kilometers. We have 89 cities, 29 towns and over 6,000 villages. So sticking to our core business, delivering a last mile to our customers still remains our core business. Again, we continuously improving the quality of service to ensure that we actually deliver on time and all the parcels safely. In response to our customer demands, we have started to offer the large size parcels delivery, utilizing railroad and trucks. We're using our own warehouse facilities, transportation to guarantee the safety of the deliveries with 52 delivery and pickup points across the country. Again, in response to the general, I guess, industry trends, Kaspos noticed that all major econ platforms are moving towards the cargo deliveries, which is why we actually set up a special standalone unit with its own transportation warehouses and fully trained Custom Clearance team to actually provide our customers with the alternative option to the postal deliveries. Again, we have a full support from our government who actually very interested in ensuring the speedy and efficient delivery of all parcels, which is why Kaspos was appointed as the economic operator, which again allows us to save time and costs on Custom Clearance. For example, there are no custom duties for the parcels under 1,000 euro and 31 kilograms, and we can actually submit the Custom Declaration in advance electronically. Again, Kaspos is utilizing Kazakhstan's unique geographical position, which is why we're developing the transit logistic services as well. We have an A-class bonded warehouse right on the border with China, which we're using to facilitate the transit flow from China into Europe and Central Asia. In addition to our standard logistic business, we're also developing a financial services. Kaspos is lucky enough to have a banking license in Kazakhstan, so we're offering the payment of pension and social welfare. We issue our bank cards. We're providing the ATM network coverage, brokerage services. We're also giving an opportunity for the population to participate in the local IPOs. We're providing the Internet acquiring services and corporate bank as well. But we're not going to stop there. We want to improve and expand our existing financial services infrastructure so we can actually become a reliable partner for the state and the governmental programs. Well, that's pretty much about us. Thank you very much for your attention. Thank you. Namkita, can you tell us a little bit about how the economic situation in different countries can impact strategy and especially impact strategy around diversification? Yeah, so from South Africa, my name is Namkita Moana, CEO of the SA Post Office. So from a South African perspective, we've seen how the economy situation of a country affects the strategy that you have to follow as a postal operator. And as I was also looking through this and realizing what the challenges that we're dealt with because remember, as postal operators, we are not operating in isolation. We operate within the logistics of the country, the economy, whether there's electricity, et cetera. So those have a direct impact on what we do. But also, if you have a country that has largely got a number of poor people, a large number of poor people, it depends on the kind of service and products that you have to offer. You can't offer the same everywhere. And if you look at South Africa as well, we have a large rural segment and therefore you require specific services there. And I came across a 2016 study that said there was a direct correlation between a country's GDP per capita and what it does in terms of offering the postal services. And they go on and on. I can share that study with you because it was quite relevant. But you'll see when we talk about the post services in South Africa. And I've said that my topic is diversify or die because that's exactly what we see if we do not diversify and we don't keep up with what the environmental changes are in the markets, we will definitely not be there tomorrow. But I don't think it's a South African phenomenon. I think this is a phenomenon everywhere. I'm very pleased to hear that you guys are profitable this year. I wish that would be our story. So well done. I'm not sure where to press the big one. Thank you. I thought I should just give South Africa at a glance for those who don't quite understand our country. We have a population of over 62 million people. 50% of these people live within the 17 of the largest metros and municipalities. So that means if you are able to service these people, you've already kind of won because you've got the other 50% that is largely unbanked and quite poor. 61.2% of our population is under 35 years old. So it also means that we need to catch up and be able to digitize and be more futuristic in our approach rather than just work as a traditional postal service. The average household size is about 3.5 people and in terms of internet access, there's about 78.9% access, but cell phone access is much higher at 92.1. So meaning that some of these people do have access to a cell phone but they don't have internet access because of where they are, both in terms of the economy and geographically. We pay over 27 million social grants and this is social grants that are paid to about 20 million people but the other number that says 27 is because someone else could be an old lady looking after, you know, orphans, etc. So the number of grants is proportionally higher than what we pay. So I mean that for us is a bit of a problem. If these people cannot become your customers in the true sense of the word, that's a problem. I'm not going to talk much about what's on the right-hand side, but everybody knows what COVID did to us but also our country is struggling with energy issues at this point. But also the government has taken a decision to say we need to resolve what we call the triple challenges which mean poverty, unemployment and inequality and therefore we need to resolve the energy crisis. We need to contain our public spending and we must make sure that we advance structural reforms and reduce inflation. Now if I go through to the post office corporate strategy we've now sat down and said if for us to continue or at least even survive we need to move from being a traditional postal operator all the way to becoming an integrated service and logistics provider. So for us that's going to be very important. Sorry I can't read my own slides, I'm getting blind. So what we've also then said is we would need to move and become this modern postal operator and as we become the postal operator we need to make sure that the four pillars at the top is what we're focusing on. Enhanced customer experience, optimized service delivery, modernized business as well as financially sustainable. So those are the pillars that we're going to be focusing on but at the bottom here we need an enabling environment to ensure that strategically we survive. In the previous panel someone spoke about strategic partnerships that for us is a strategy of the future. We also realize that we can't do this on our own. We also need other people who can help us but at the same time we need to ensure that we change our business. Now in terms of diversifying our own strategy we've put down three horizons. One is to optimize the operations and make sure that we protect and sustain the existing revenues. There's not much to talk about there because we really are losing customers hand over fist currently because of exactly what was said earlier that we are no longer competing among ourselves. We are competing with the world even with our own customers but we also aim to increase revenue generation so that we can deal with e-commerce and digital services but in the third horizon we really want to extend our business capabilities going forward. I thought I should share this with you as part of what we call the post office of tomorrow. We've got a new strategy that looks to making sure that logistics becomes at the core, partnerships as well, e-commerce is a big issue. The authentication center but as well as the digital business hubs but in business hubs we're not talking about just business hubs we want to become the one stop shop for government services in South Africa where the government itself cannot reach very rural areas and we want to be able for people to come in and diversify our services way beyond just what we do. We're talking there about small and medium enterprises who would be able to participate and operate from our platforms. I know an example in the Telcos sector in South Africa one of the cell phone operators has started selling fried chicken on their platform and they've sold so much and basically they're saying we have the platform it's working for us in terms of what we want it to do. How else do you diversify? How else do you open it up and make sure that you go through to everything? So I do think that would be my last slide but definitely we are moving forward but I'd like to make a disclaimer at this point the South African post office currently is undergoing what we call under the South African law business rescue. We went to the owner of the South African post office which is the government and we said to them because of what we've inherited over the years because the last time we posted a profit was 2006 so it's been downhill ever since but we know what we didn't do we didn't pivot early enough we didn't digitize we didn't move with the times we just sat there and became a traditional postal operator and we then went to the government and said to them if you assist us and put us under rescue so that we are protected and then we can start building and making sure that we can build a stronger maybe smaller in the beginning post office but stronger and then we can grow organically and go forward. Thank you very much. Thank you. Mariela Seychelles Post your customer base is something like 100,000 so can you talk to us a little bit about what diversification options you have as a smaller post? Good morning everyone I'm Mariela, CEO of Seychelles Post Offices I'm new to the world of post offices I've been there for two and a half years I am from a retail background so before I kind of answer the question I'll give you a bit of details on where Seychelles is I've gone forward how do I go back? Sorry which one? The red one Why is it not working? Other red one Green There we go Here we go Obviously whenever you say Seychelles everybody thinks of the holiday place so I wanted to kind of give you the kind of the geographical position of Seychelles and probably will explain it to why we think it's important in the world of logistics and diversification so obviously we are a very small place 115 islands probably the smallest country in Africa one of the smallest in the world and in terms of our main island Marhe it's very small so you can drive from one end to the other in probably a couple of hours and we have only five post offices but we're actually opening another one because we see the potential there and obviously the post office that we've inherited the building that we're in is something that dates back to the 1860 so it's pretty old so you can imagine so in terms of what we are doing to go forward to diversify our business is digitalization obviously like the lady from South Africa said we've inherited a post office which hasn't really changed over the years and now suddenly we have a customer base which has changed we understand technology e-commerce and everything and as the post we have to catch up and the catching up is you have to do it now or else you die and obviously in doing that there's a lot of work to do a lot of public awareness as well and a lot of education so in terms of digitalization we are looking to integrate our systems connect with external companies build a new website with the UPU team at DotPost and also work with some of the external partners here the wider sector postal partners of the UPU to offer direct to consumer marketing via the post now in terms of Seychelles because we're such a small place we don't have very much of a retail existence so e-commerce is one of the biggest things to us pretty much everything is imported whether it's food or drink or clothing everything is imported so there is a huge potential for us in e-commerce and as the post we want to use our platform to connect the people of Seychelles with the e-commerce providers out there and also to increase our outbound e-commerce because we realize Seychelles as a tourist location has a lot to offer in terms of local products which we can sell online to the rest of the world and those products are probably not interested to the local market but they are interesting to the international markets and in doing that we will help the smaller medium enterprises locally and in terms of logistics and I want to separate logistics from e-commerce our government is actually supporting us to build a new IMPC which will be airside a lot bigger than what we have now currently we work in a very small space which is 20 square meters and it's going to go up to 500 square meters and we have the chance to offer transit mail operations to the rest of the region which is Africa, Middle East and you're working with the Asian continent In Seychelles, delivery hasn't really been a thing recently because we don't have a national addressing system so it was traditionally that you came to the post to collect your items and now we have been working with the government and customs to allow for last mile deliveries we've started doing this with EMS and now we're going to do it all parcels and small packets and it's something that we see the customer is really asking for and obviously the private sector e-commerce partners we're working with are asking for this to happen and customers in Seychelles are very internet savvy and they are way ahead of the post so we have to do all these things to be able to catch up with them and the national addressing system is something that the government of Seychelles is driving as well because it realizes it's got a population that is spending a lot of money but doesn't have a digital connectivity to the world in terms of who they are, where they are and also it's part of the whole awareness of how digital economy and technology works When we talk about the e-services that we're working on obviously we're working with custom Seychelles for the clients to be able to pay their customs taxes and duties before it gets to the country because that is a big problem for us items arrive then you've got to do all the customs forms and all the filling of forms you have to go to this place and that place and obviously that for the customer is not ideal and obviously the amount of time things taking customs is not ideal for the partners we work with so this is something that we've managed to well work with our customs partners who actually see the benefits in doing that and recently they've allowed us to do the last mile deliveries they no longer open your packet at the post office in front of everybody which is a big step forward for us and they pre-clear all items and our last point if you like is we are having a retail background I see the post office as a retailer and obviously in Seychelles because we have a big tourism industry we actually have a souvenir and gift shop in the post office where we also sell a lot of stamps so philatilly is a big important thing to us and we are working again with other wider sector postal partners here to launch our first digital stamp which hopefully will be early next year we're working with private sector to also have a pop-up cafe outside the post office because obviously it's a high-foot forward tourism and also develop postal branded products so these are the things that we're trying to do to not fully rely on purely the mail thank you thank you oh I forgot I had in the slide with an awful lot of statistics on just to show how in Seychelles the population is connected to the internet how much money they spend online and for a small population they actually have quite a big e-commerce power and that was me thank you thank you thank you and Nermeen can you talk to us a little bit about diversification strategy and what are the key factors that a post should possess when it comes to to having an impactful diversification strategy okay thank you so much Amanda good morning everyone first let me tell you first about Egypt Post and how it's established and how it started actually because Egypt Post started with a lot of diversification already when it started on the 19th century I know Egypt is the first country in the world that make a mail system a regular mail system but Egypt Post was started its establishment on 1865 and it was fascinating how it was having this diversification of products not only about mail, letter or parcel transportation and delivery in 2016 we discovered that we need to go back to diversification again why it's happening because the perspective of diversification we have seen that the optimal utilization of the postal network we have 4300 post office all across Egypt it's all connected we provide postal service and financial services and these are the traditional way we offer products we find out that with the declining of letter mail and the financial service of saving accounts not bringing any new customers actually are losing so we have a take a look on the market around us and see what are the emerging corporates and making big names it's like utility pill payment engine last mile delivery with some better customer experience and a quicker road the government entities around us establishing their own portal to allow submit to the request online and there have been each entity around us is making their own approaches of developing their product and the ways you offer their service to citizen other than using the traditional postal service so what happened that we have you know the 3D postal concept was like more than 10 years ago was emerging on the UPU so we have a take a look at this concept and we started to make a customer tailored service it's mean bring financial service with postal service combined together and allow any entity to offer their products at the post office so the whole idea is about we define the parcel the sender and recipient so what will happen we will define the citizen so it's data captured and transmitted to third party and this is like the administrative service I believe the next slide will make it more so before we have mail deposit and mail delivery and cash collection deposit and disperse after moving from these traditional services to integrated product and customer tailored services which are we combine together first of all data capture and transmission to the third party document collection plus delivery plus cash collection for third party we just combine these two things together and make it integrated the other ones make parcel deposit this is especially for SMEs and e-commerce you might have the ability to build your own marketplace and to make a payment getaway some SMEs will never have that chance to even list themselves on marketplace but they can sell their products on WhatsApp or Facebook or any digital way so they will require simply someone to collect the cash on their behalf and put it in their account that what Azure Post has developed so we have addressed the need we make screening on the market and see how we can address these needs and this slide can tell you before and after this is the balance account balance gross from 2000 and I believe 10 this is what we started the digitalization of our financial services and from 2014 this is the digitalization completed in 2015 we started the diversification you can see the gross and just saving account and current accounts with interest that's all and then we have listed all of this as accounts managed by Azure Post also this show you the number of transaction of cash collection for third party we started in 2016 it was stable for three years and then you can see maybe more than 100% the gross for the previous years and this is amount of cash collection by billions also and with the gross of this data capture of the citizen cash collection for third party maybe document collection as well there was a need to make a refund for the citizen so we developed a new service a new product to make the refund for the citizen and this shows you that number of transaction gross starting from 2016 until 2023 so we started you know on 2015 with these products and we are here all these entities now use Azure Post as their own contact human contact points of offerings their product to the citizen how we can do this first of all you need to define what are the needs second one have your own system and your own team sometimes we have been asked to develop a service within less than a week so or maybe a reliable technology provider but he has to be your partner because the idea of making a proof of concept and a use case and then we will shake and make a presentation and this will not count you need to be super fast to address the needs also quality and standardization of a process now we offer more than 170 service imagine if you bring the staff all over the 4,300 post office and train them every month this is impossible so what happened we follow one standard process even there is a box for business rules for the entity so all our colleagues and the post office just collect the entity and then the service and he sees the business rule and what is required and the system guide him about what to do this was very important was a big challenge for my colleagues for quality when they developed this it was training the whole staff more than 20,000 in a one year they keep training them about the new concept of e-post and administration how to capture the data how to mix what quality data capturing and how to process when it's happened for the first service it just needs a circular to be published a detailed circular to guide them how to provide the service and you can provide a new service like every week to every month so it was very important to do so thank you thank you I just want to follow up on some of the things that we've talked about here so Namkeeta you mentioned that what happens in a country impacts the post and what people need and what kind of services are provided and we talked a little bit about social services as well how important do you think it is when you're looking at diversification strategy to use the postal infrastructure or to build something completely new and kind of where is your vision in that moving forward and do you see it being balanced one way or the other or one taking precedent over the other yeah so from a South African perspective we've had what we call the infrastructure has always been our biggest strength because it didn't matter where you went in the country a small little town the big cities the rural areas there was always a post office so that has always been one of our advantages from anything that we do however what we are now saying in terms of what we've just said you do not need to I'm also I joined in April 2021 so I'm also just two and a half years in the business and coming in with fresh eyes you can see things that could have been done differently and done better one of which was we did not need to have the same bricks and mortar big office 12 tellers everywhere in the country you do need to to segment your markets and in other markets you sell certain services like we do motor vehicle licensing and it's one of our better moving products but in other areas all you need is a point of presence where you'll have like a kiosk and the old ladies must come and get their social grant maybe also get their medicines delivered etc so we are now beginning to look at the country and segmenting everything to say how is it that we can serve the customer so you may not have so many bricks and mortar but you will see us in many many many more places the filling stations for garages where people converge but also which we think is much more important is becoming this hub for government services so that people can do all these other government services within a post office it brings all the feet through but it also is a service to the people thank you and if anyone else wants to comment on that as well as far as diversification strategy you know mainly thinking about the postal infrastructure and how to leverage it versus kind of starting from a clean slate with providing completely new product or service okay actually there is two types of diversification one is not easy but it's kind of done in very close time which is a horizontal one it's find your core business what you are best at and try to integrate them and bring something new for your current customer and to attract more the other one is a little bit hard if you can bring a quite new business to complement your which is for example marketplace there is a lot of attempts from postal operator to develop their own marketplace it's not easy to to build this technology is easy as Ivana said from Slovenia it is not it's not the magical one you can have the best marketplace ever but it requires and you know how different know how knowledge from our capacities this relations of listing merchants and making products bring the best prices you know the even sometimes sells the products less than the original vendor as the producer of the products how they can do this it's not easy actually it will be of course a volume generating for us if we manage to do such a thing so as the now they control the whole ecosystem the end process they are now affecting our industry so I believe this is a hard type of diversification which is very important to have and maybe the UPU maybe the dream of the UPU is having this huge marketplace developed by UPU and enables the SMEs to list themselves and show the products maybe maybe this is the new step to compete with our investors okay thank you and speaking of the UPU I mean as members I would be great to hear from you as well how you see the UPU how it could support its members in their diversification efforts so balancing this need of providing your USO to offering and reinventing yourselves as well and the kind of services you provide to your citizens and also if anyone in the audience has any ideas on this topic too yes here can we get a mic on this side our mic runners runners are at lunch is it on? yes hi and a grand thing in terms of diversification what role can the UPU play I'm not sure that's a good question but should the UPU have a role in diversifying is that really what the UPU is about because surely the UPU is there to ensure that mail is provided between between countries so on some of some of the diversifications that you're talking about financial services is it really anything to do with the UPU? I personally don't think so and some of the other things such as social payments that are happening within post offices domestically that's a very domestic service it's got absolutely nothing to do with the UPU so I think I think many countries maybe have too high expectations of what the UPU can do on some of their diversification yeah you go first actually each post have learned how to make the diversification through the UPU it was the UPU when I have we have seen the E-pulsing administration services and lists of E-services and how we can develop this so it was the UPU who bring us know how to do it so it's not only about the regulation and standards it's also about international cooperation of mail exchange expertise among all the nations you know it's not only about the industrial countries and they are leading the digitalization and innovation but also there could be a developing countries who have a good idea that address the need of its citizen so the big industrial country can even benefit from this so in UPU is more it's much more than mail regulation and standardization it's a place when we come together and learn from each other so actually Egypt is one of the countries that benefits a lot maybe maybe then 80% of our idea how to adopt to diversification how to develop this what we need have been identified through our participation in the UPU so I think as a start because we are all we have a crisis of relevance as post offices or it's developing in generally many many countries and I don't see how the UPU would then be immune to that problem you know so if we as postal operators have an issue with how relevant can we stay how do we keep ourselves afloat how do we stay you know relevant in markets that are you know there's disruptors everywhere there has to be a question around what is it that the UPU can do for itself first to stay relevant but also to help us so if I were to answer the question directly I would think about how the UPU should start thinking about developing a capability you know matrix of sorts or database and help us to say a framework rather which can be a framework that can be used internationally but if I take it to South Africa I then make sure that I tailor make it to my local needs but in terms of standardization and the information that we get we all can tap into that because there are resources that the UPU can give us in terms of research etc so I do think there's a role for UPU we're not necessarily saying they must do the work for us but they must make sure that they build this capability framework or best practice framework take the top 20 postal operators in the world and say how what is Switzerland doing in this segment what are they doing well and this one and that one and then we all can kind of you know replicate as far as it can work in our in our country so I do think there is but also just the last point is around they can assist in policy formulation as well and as far as the postal union is concerned and then the role is strategic of course it's not just about them operating for us so there's definitely a role that they can play and also looking at new offerings what else can we do as post offices other than just the traditional postal work that we've been doing they need to be the leading people to come and say hey this is what's happening in other countries have you looked at this have you looked at that thank you I kind of agree with that I think the UPU provides the platform for all the postal operators to unite together and obviously then provides the information of what's going on in other parts of the world and I think in postal jurisdictions like ours in our part of the world the UPU is the strategy that the government will listen to as well so it provides that framework for governments to see what's happening elsewhere because I think governments if they were left to their own devices probably wouldn't think the post is more of a local thing rather than a global thing and the UPU together with the wider postal sector give the small posts like Seychelles the opportunity to tap into other things that you would not otherwise have been able to yeah I think the network effect in being able to connect with other posts and learn about what others are doing and have a platform for that is really important From my perspective on the international business side probably the great if UPU can act as the facilitator or moderator when it comes to the conversation with the major e-coms so basically we all know that we're losing the flow to the commercial cargo but again there's gotta be an option that postal operators can do something utilizing existing infrastructure asset base so what can we do as the postal operators to bring back the volume and this is the conversation somebody has to establish UPU representing 192 countries so that's a strong voice so tell us what we can do to bring the volume back to service the customers as much as possible Thank you Does anyone else want to add to that question? Charles go ahead or Kate I have a question Do we have any mics? I have a mic here I have a question I have a mic My turn Okay Sam Brangman, Bernmilla Post Postmaster General I have one quick question as a postal office that's either the government department or government funded that's trying to innovate and grow sustainability and to survive how do you manage the concept of competition in our in Bernmilla we're trying to diversify we're trying to grow our e-commerce business but where we have complaints from local couriers that say that at the government department we shouldn't compete so my question is how do you handle the concept or what strategy do you use regarding competition? Good question We have an example like that in South Africa where because we we're not fully funded by government and because our country is as rural as it is and we have this mandate to ensure that everyone in the country has access to postal services then the country then went to our regulator and the regulator then they call it protected area so we we're the only ones who are supposed to be delivering anything from zero to one kilogram so it is our own designated area but about 20 years ago we were not doing it as well as we should and the courier companies came in and they started eating our lunch since then and now they are we are all in court with that because they're saying we want to create a monopoly for a post office that is ineffective that is not working and so that case is still a case that is being fought but it is true I mean there's competition issues whether we can force them to do it but how we from a post office perspective are dealing with it we're saying to them it's either you pay or play in the sense that in the rural areas nobody wants to go there it's too far it's expensive etc so they want to cherry pick and do the urban areas and the big cities and they leave the difficult and expensive work to us so we're saying it's fine if you want to do that it's either you pay us a fee for us to be able to do this or you go you take your cargo yourself there but it was still I mean we haven't resolved it at this point it's still a major issue like I say it's still in court but it's something that we need to resolve because they can't just do the cherry picking and then leave us to do the dirty work so to speak in addition to Miss Pita Fedze actually I agree with her but also there is a very important concept that we need to recognize here first how the government defines the designated operator in the country is very important you are designated to provide universal service obligation and to is defined in the national regulation of the country so the government is committed to offer all across the country basic service with god equality at affordable rates so it is the government who will define the scope of universal obligation and how to make it and there is a balance as Miss Makita said that you can define there is a lot of best practices about pay or play and also the service offering you know the entities related to the quality of service the product developments are away from the government and the regulations they're focused on the market so you are successful once you see the market and you compete with them and making a government entity is not like you have a police officer say you have to go to this entity because it's government no the citizen and the customer are free to choose but when you are located all over around them and you offering get a good quality of service and much lower rates why do you will go to others actually during covid we have faced a stop of air flights and social media there was screams for the people where is your post why you know this private company has taken this amount just to ship this litter mill item to this country where is your post because we were stopped immediately because we have heavily dependent on the air flight passenger not the cargo you're not familiar with the cargo transportation so our operation stopped like for three months so people on social media was screaming because there was a misuse of this bad situation that the whole world was in and the private was very expensive doing this so there is nothing at all contradiction about being a government and make the customer needs because being a government it has to do with the inverse obligation it has nothing to do with the way you offer your product it's not I believe it's not affected by each other and I have a question over here Charles Yes, one too okay so Charles from Post Malaysia nice to see you and what a great panel by the way I really enjoyed it I do have one comment and then a question my comment is I'm very unhappy that South Africa beat England last weekend get that on record before you go any further but I will be wearing my pocket shirt on Saturday when I go and watch them so good luck anyway my question actually was to Semion so Semion your profit turnaround is really quite impressive unfortunately you didn't get a chance to talk a little bit about how and whether it's diversification or something or is it cost down so I'd love just to have a few minutes so I could on what deliver that incredible turnaround thanks thank you very much Charles well basically that's a combination of two and again that's related to the previous question whether post as a national operator should compete with the in the open market I think we do have to do that we have the asset base which we have to maximize in terms of revenue we're earning per square meter or per kilometer or whatever you call it and again we have to be very commercial we have to look at the expenses that we incur we have a huge a moment of employees which we have to look after we have the infrastructure we have the tools and equipments again which require the modernization and again that that needs to change and this is what's actually happening with us we started looking at the numbers we started looking at our expense we drill down to the expenses do we actually need that do we have to modernize that can we switch it to IT solutions can we find a better and efficient use of for example our post offices so yes it is a combination of two we're trying to diversify we're trying to utilize our asset base as efficient as possible and we're also looking after our costs thank you hi Sid Hart from the Asia Pacific Post Co-operative a couple of comments rather than questions but both both based based on this panel and the previous one I think someone in the audience said were these things actually in the UP's remit or should the UP be responsible for them I think the bigger question when it comes to whether it be the UP or co-operatives like our own and IPC is what's our purpose in the postal world that we have today certainly within the cooperative we've completely changed our tack on how we support members our focus now is purely on how we help the members to bring new product new revenue streams online and frankly not being blindly positive about the market we're in any longer so asking the big somewhat uncomfortable questions a lot of the time about our relevance and where we stand against our competitors part of that is the question around regulation and what that regulation does for us so for many years it's given us a privileged position in the market it's enabled us to get goods in and out of country quickly we've had in some cases a pure monopoly on movement and that now has actually turned round it's become often certainly across Asia and the Pacific where most of our posts are still highly regulated a noose around the neck rather than an enabler so there is a there's a part to be played by the UP and co-operatives in opening up our world and how it is today there's a part to be played in having those tough conversations with regulators and governments and the operators on how those regulations are either implied fairly across the market so that our competitors are facing the same restraints and restrictions that we are or they are reduced so that we all have an open market to play in the big part that I would point to with that and someone mentioned cherry picking earlier in a number of our countries we've got some of the most highly island based countries in the world in Asia and the Pacific the likes of Ninja Van and similar competitors will be giving upwards of 20% of their volume back to the post because they cannot have the reach and depth of reach that we have as an industry and yet they're still driving down our pricing they're giving us unprofitable volume that we have to deliver because we have an obligation so I think the question on UPU relevance on this the question on cooperative relevance for me of course is whether we is not whether we have a place in that conversation in the modern postal world it's more about what our obligation is to move quickly and with priority of vision that's my comment any other questions Hi, my name is Siva from the UPU and I thought I might share some thoughts and what the role of the UPU is at least from the perspective of the secretaries concerned and been party to many discussions on this I think it's really important for us to suggest the fact that the agency is an intergovernmental agency so it is a treaty-based organization where member states are engaged in making sure that we have the appropriate rules to allow for the exchange of mail and as Namin from Egypt Post pointed out a critical focus of governments ensuring the universal service provision and so discussions around diversification profitability and all of that is really sort of connected to the idea that there are challenges with ensuring the universal service provision and how do we actually make sure that designated operators are still in a position to be able to sustainably provide for the universal service provision and so in terms of the work that we do at the UPU and the International Bureau there's two things one is there is a focus on supporting member states in developing the rules and treaties that are needed to facilitate the exchange of international mail and other things that are sort of related to the Post but there's also a very significant focus on knowledge sharing and best practices and this is where there are opportunities to talk about diversification strategies it's also where there are opportunities for us to help designated operators in their conversations with governments because not all governments quite understand what the postal network can bring to the table in terms of financial services financial inclusion social inclusion and that's a whole gamut of it if we are to take ourselves from the narrow box of thinking of the post as an agent of delivering just parcels and letters but see it purely as an agnostic physical network which at the end of the day has a person who's delivering something I think the world could potentially be your oyster and this is really quite important because the pandemic for example actually underscored this when governments needed someone to deliver social payments when governments needed someone to deliver health products someone to deliver fresh produce it was the post map in many countries and we've done studies on this and have actually published examples of all of the work that post offices did across the world during the pandemic but the point I'm trying to make is this diversification per se it's certainly about profitability trying to increase your opportunities to be able to sustain your business models for sure but as a designated operator I think the conversation is really about saying we can do a whole range of other things as well because as and in our conversations with you as governments we want to bring this to your attention so that you can support us in our journey as well so you know I think these are some of the points that we do debate and discuss in the U.P.U. and the relevance of the U.P. is very much attached to those two things treaty making knowledge sharing and best practice sharing and it's a bit unfortunate that you know at the reason next time Congress and READ there were a number of proposals seeking to actually gain resourcing in order to build knowledge bases unfortunately member states didn't approve those changes and as a result we're now in a mode where we're seeking funding in order to be able to do that work so I think it's also important for member states to recognize as the panelists did today there is a fair amount of good work that comes out of the U.P.U. in terms of perspective sharing knowledge sharing and that's not necessarily for the bigger post it's actually for the smaller players for the developing countries and the least developed countries and without proper funding across the membership it's near impossible to achieve thank you thank you for that yeah actually I want to to make a comment on said hard point about the regulations I believe balance regulation is all about balance and the universe is at a balance and when the human beings are making so much carbon emissions and we affected this balance we are seeing severe consequences on this so the regulation is not matured and not balanced that will cause a distraction for the sectors we are about let's be honest here and open and transparent as well the government state has to define what is required and what you're going to achieve to the citizen and they need to do so from all the perspective from opening market regulating market and there is a very important point when we're relating to regulations for example in the previous panels that have been the free shipping policy just google on free shipping you will find the way you do it they telling them you calculate the shipping charges and you distribute it on the products and you just put the margin and then it's illusion they telling them how to deceive the customer where are the regulators in such a thing there are bad practices about monopolization for the e-commerce they offer free shipping for only the products provided by them this is a monopolization this is not a monopolization by law it's a monopolization by needs so where are the competition protection here where are the regulators here they are not in the place so they need to keep monitoring on the whole situation on this and getting the point of Siva said about the best practices sharing and knowledge sharing this is very important actually and about the principle of funding and resources I believe the postal network is the best resources in this room we have Ivana thank you so much for the wonderful presentation I loved it I was texting after you and just customer you know I can show you I take notes it's important so this is an expertise that have taught me in just a few minutes perspective I need to pay attention I even send it to my colleagues in Egypt now you know we need to address we need to focus on this area so I believe the postal network has plenty of expertise we just need to find the mechanism and methodology because we understand each other much better than anyone else so we just need to cooperate more and more and work together more and more and collaborate and make this postal network more integrated and more united thank you thank you one thing I want to follow up on is looking more forward in the next five to ten years so we've heard a lot about your strategy so far in ways you've diversified with providing more government services to citizens financial services more services along the e-commerce supply chain but are there other products and services that you've identified where you see yourself in that market in the future or that you would want to experiment with you know that we haven't discussed already this morning be great to hear some of your ideas and what you're thinking for the future well for us in Kazakhstan similar to Saudi Arabia we are inbound market so we will be focusing on the international e-commerce trying to bring as much volume into the country as possible whether it's going to be cargo postal transit so anything we can do to increase the volume that's main focus for us yeah I mean obviously we're in a similar situation as well it's all about inbound e-commerce we can increase our outbound e-commerce but it's very minimal obviously we're a very small country and the tourism market is the market we want to capture and that's where probably helping the small companies come into play and also changing some of the parts of the post office into retail branded products and because the post office is a brand that in the context of sales can be sold to the customer and anyone from the audience I know we have a lot of posts represented here today if you want to share any diversification efforts or strategies or products or services that you've seen successful or that you're looking towards in the future feel free to chime in as well we have the strategy session on this later too so don't be shy share what you're doing and ask questions as well to our panelists yeah I don't want to keep us from lunch we're right at 12 30 so I think I'll not have anyone dislike me today and thank you so much for sharing your strategies with us this morning and we have a lunch break everyone we're coming back here at 2 we'll talk about logistics and e-commerce again and more diving into tangible strategies for that so I hope to see you back here at 2 and thank you so much for participating thank you