Royal Mail continues to struggle to deliver on its promises. The UK postal service has asked regulators to reduce less valuable mail deliveries to every other day, and shares in its holding company, International Distributions Services, languish below the initial public offering price of October 2013. Things could not be more different in Italy: the value of Poste Italiane’s shares has almost doubled since it went public in 2015. Moreover, unlike Royal Mail, Poste Italiane has maintained its network of post offices and financial services throughout the country. Proposing this comparison is the famous Lex column in the Financial Times, which crowns Poste Italiane’s positivity in juxtaposition to the difficulties encountered by Royal Mail.
The comparison
The London business and financial newspaper points out how the company led by CEO Matteo Del Fante boasts the largest payments network in Italy with Postepay, with profits almost doubling in the last five years, while Royal Mail’s National Savings and Investments generated only £500 million from financial services last year: a quarter of the profits generated by Poste Italiane’s financial services, as the City newspaper points out. With its new strategic plan, Poste was thus able to promise higher dividends to shareholders in the coming years.
