ISLAMABAD: Digitalisation of Pakistan’s postal services is the government’s first priority so that people can make full use of modern facilities, Postmaster General (Northern Punjab) Mohammad Anwar Malik said on Friday.

He was addressing participants of a ceremony organised to observe World Post Day at the General Post Office (GPO) in Rawalpindi.

Mr Malik said the performance and services of Pakistan Post were being improved significantly with changing conditions, adding that services were being digitalised with the help of South Korea.

The postmaster general said that 500,000 people are serving in 600,000 offices of the postal services sector worldwide and distribute billions of items annually. He added that 1,000 motorcycles will soon be provided to postmen across the country to ensure prompt delivery of mail.

Students from different schools presented the national anthem.Meanwhile, the ‘Postal Development Report 2022’ was released to mark World Post Day on Friday.

According to the report, the global postal revenues stemming from parcels and logistics have reached a tipping point where they are larger than letter-post revenues for the first time as recorded in 147 years of postal statistics.

The report, released by the Universal Postal Union (UPU), states that unless macroeconomic conditions further worsen, UPU forecast domestic parcel-post volumes may reach high single-digit annual growth rates in main markets in 2022, consistent with a global forecasted parcel volume growth rate of about 7.5pc.

As expected with the huge economic slowdown, global domestic letter-post volumes recorded an overall decline of 13.6pc between 2019 and 2021 – a record in mail volume losses in the current century.

However, the volume increased marginally, by 0.5pc, over 2021 compared with the previous year – representing the single largest increase in the last 15 years.

UPU forecasts a small single-digit decline for 2022, around 0.3pc below the pre-pandemic 2.8pc yearly decline trend.

The analysis shows direct marketing and advertising mail seems to have started its recovery, signalled by 4pc year-on-year growth between 2020 and 2021, thus continuing to help stem letter-post volume declines brought about by the negative impacts of digital substitution on commercial letter-post transactions.

With steady e-commerce growth driven by Covid-19 restrictions, global domestic parcel volumes increased by 33.6pc between 2019 and 2021.

The highest year-on-year growth rate ever recorded for the domestic parcel-post stream in UPU postal statistics was achieved in 2020, with a 17.6pc increase globally; this growth continued into 2021, with 13.6pc year-on-year growth, well above the pre-pandemic 7.5pc yearly growth trend.

Published in Dawn, October 8th, 2022