Portugal’s struggling Post Office, CTT, already has an agreement with Amazon to deliver packages across Spain and wants to extend this service to Portugal in an effort to capitalise on its delivery network.
CTT, led by Francisco Lacerda, is suffering a not unexpected structural decline in letter deliveries but its parcels business is growing as online shopping becomes more popular in Portugal.
CTT is the parcels delivery market leader with 30% of the business and Lacerda wants to see this grow despite Amazon not yet having a Portuguese website while servicing its Portuguese customers from Spain with carriers such as Seur.
In Spain, CTT already has an agreement with Amazon for the distribution of orders in Portugal through Tourline Express, an operation that Francisco Lacerda wants to, "develop and strengthen."
“We are not the Amazon distributors in Portugal, but one day we will be," Lacerda told a group of journalists in Porto.
“We are permanently working on target customers that we find interesting. This is the day-to-day life of a company that operates in a competitive market. We are a strong, capable competitor with a very interesting offer and a single integration, with a network of postmen who are no longer only in Portugal," said the CTT boss who has presided over a calamitous erosion in the company’s share price since privatisation due to the letters business suffering a ten year collapse in volume of 50%.
Asked about the exciting joint e-commerce platform that CTT and Sonae are developing, an investment of €15 million that aims to help Portuguese companies, "take advantage of the widespread growth of e-commerce," Lacerda had no news.
As for CTT’s transformation plan, presented last December and which has generated much controversy with the closure of several Post Offices, Lacerda said that the number of jobs at CTT remains stable and will not decrease, even though his own plan foresees cutting 800 jobs by 2020.
Meanwhile, Amazon is rather ahead of CTT in its delivery plans with the launch of the Amazon Delivery Service Partner business whereby customers are being helped to set up their own local delivery service. This increases the company's delivery network and speeds up delivery times.
The new partnership programme was launched this week to ensure swift delivery of purchases to Amazon Prime customers and to give consumers a way of profitably collaborating with the company.
Those who decide to form their own local delivery network will have access to substantial discounts on delivery vans with the Amazon logo, uniforms, fuel, insurance and other perks.
The minimum investment required in this case is $10,000 and the pilot project is being run only in the US for the time being. Amazon also is testing drone delivery systems but may consider a link with CTT in the meantime.
