 In a rapidly changing world, postal services everywhere are having to adapt faster and innovate better. The sector is striving to build fully integrated networks, products and services to better meet the needs of customers and businesses in the 21st century. I declare the name of the president of the Ivory Coast, His Excellency Mr. Alassane Wattra, opened the work of the 2015 World Strategic Conference of the Postal Union. Chared by the Republic of Côte d'Ivoire, the conference gathered more than 750 delegates in Geneva to discuss progress on the Doha postal strategy and the trends and issues that will shape the postal sector's next global roadmap to be adopted in 2016. With male volumes declining, we must shift the postal paradigm and put innovation at the top of our agenda in order to take advantage of the new opportunities that are emerging around us. One of these opportunities is trade facilitation. Several postal services are improving access to foreign markets for micro, small and medium-sized enterprises through innovative, easy export programs that cut through red tape. There are up to 510 million SMEs in the world, making up 80% of global business, and the postal sector is, and must continue to be, a partner of choice. Governments must rely on the national postal infrastructure to help them implement the Bali Trade Facilitation Agreement. Postal services are an important ingredient in the mix that is necessary to implement this agreement. And it also has to bring around the table all actors, internationally and nationally, that are going to be supportive in creating the ability of this small and medium enterprises to implement this trade facilitation agreement. E-commerce, particularly cross-border, presents huge opportunities for business development and innovation. Global e-commerce sales are expected to reach 2.3 trillion US dollars by 2017. But posts need to move fast to gain and retain market share. Currently the postal networks are the networks of last resort. We're getting leftovers, packages and parcels that no one else wants. And if we don't adjust our products, services and quality to match with what the customers are looking, there's a real danger that we may get marginalised in this race for winning the market share in e-commerce. The Universal Postal Union's new e-commerce program aims to increase reliability of postal networks, predictability of service delivery, and transparency of products and services for international customers. UPU is building the language that will allow us to exchange packages on the whole of the planet. UPU is the way to talk to everyone about the language of e-commerce. But e-commerce is not just an opportunity for postal services from the industrialised world, but also for those in the developing world. Although Africa remains the region with the lowest penetration of e-commerce, a recent UNCTAD report says the future of e-commerce in sub-Saharan Africa is promising. And posts want to capitalise on this. You can order on a computer, you can pay on a computer, but the computer will never give you the article that you have ordered. So you will have to go through a computer that will physically carry the merchandise that you have ordered on the internet. So I think the post has a great perspective on it, especially because of the development of e-commerce in the world. A successful cross-border e-commerce, there needs to be better integration of postal operations, transportation and customs to create a seamless postal supply chain. Posts are working closely with customs to speed up clearance of postal items by exchanging more data in advance and improving processes. This will improve all stakeholders' ability to take part in the global economy. We pay a lot of attention to SMEs, so we try to provide as many practical tools as possible to facilitate. We try to simplify and harmonise our procedures to provide maximum facilities and facilitations for business. The conference clearly recognised postal services as a motor of the global economy. With their logistic capabilities and the reach of their vast networks, postal services are well positioned to provide effective solutions to facilitate trade for online merchants and small and medium-sized businesses worldwide.