News

TNT plans to cut 11,000 employees from its Dutch mail operations in the next couple of years, replacing them with part-time workers and franchisees. It will also move to a three-day-per-week delivery service in an asset-free mail network operated largely through subcontractors. That was the vision described at the European Postal Services Conference in Brussels by Pieter Kunz, Managing Director of TNT’s European Mail Networks.



“In the Netherlands, we will make 11,000 people redundant in the next couple of years. They will be replaced with part-timers and franchisees,” Mr. Kunz said. Mail collection and delivery will be outsourced, and TNT will become “managers of mail”.



Operations will be reorganised into deliveries on three days a week in the next two to three years, according to Mr. Kunz. “If politicians want six days a week, then they will have to finance it. As a company we will not finance it,” he declared. He said the Universal Service Obligation was “a kind of Jurassic Park and we should get rid of it”.



TNT’s plans are the result of forecasts that mail volumes could drop by as much as 50 percent in the next five years. Mr. Kunz’s comments come in the wake of the collective labour agreement with Unions that paves the way for restructuring.



TNT has been franchising its post office network and will complete the closure of its own network next year. Outside the Netherlands, TNT will focus its mail activity on three markets: Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom, where it will also restructure and seek partners. At the same time, the company is developing its e-commerce activities to offer a full back office, fulfilment and delivery service to online traders. The strategic move is based on a current growth rate of ten percent in business to- consumer parcels in the Netherlands.