Delivering Customer Value – The Next 20 Years

The IPC Annual Conference in Edinburgh on 15 May, 2009 took the theme: Delivering Customer Value – The Next 20 Years.

The conference featured a keynote speech from the Futurist, Matthias Horx. Other speakers included Tina Southall, Global Enterprise Director, Vodaphone, Carlos Henrique Custódio, President, Brazilian Post, and Jean-Paul Bailly, IPC Board Chairman and Chairman and CEO, Groupe La Poste.

Elmar Toime moderated the conference and presented findings of a strategic working group that had been set up at the request of the IPC Board to consider the longer term needs and expectations of customers.

How the posts will evolve in each country will be different, but there is a common story for letter mail. In concluding Mr Toime believed that there was a consensus about the future of the letters business and that whether the scenario points to 30 percent decline in the next five to seven years, or to 50 percent, we are not trying to predict that. What we are suggesting is that you need to have a view on where in your business the critical point is. How far can you tolerate decline with your current model? If that’s not going to work, then as we’ve heard the future of financing your business, the act of government bail out if that’s necessary, are going to trigger substantial changes and some of these may be taken out of your own hands in terms of your ability to determine your future.

Herbert-Michael Zapf, CEO of IPC concluded by stating that bringing together the leaders of the postal industry together to talk about the problems and challenges they face is the key objective for IPC. That is why the posts own IPC, it is their company.

 Documentation from the Conference