“The Future of Czech Post: Challenges and Potential for Change”

Czech Post has many problems. The bottom line is that it doesn’t make money. And she doesn’t even know what services she should provide. Lots of other companies can already deliver packages. And in no time, other private carriers can also deliver letters. This will be the last blow for the post office.

So what is the purpose of the state post office and will it be in the future? With nearly twenty-five thousand employees? There is room for imagination here. Maybe it’s a good welfare institution where employees can sit for their eight hours and get a slightly below average wage for it.

However, there is one mysterious corner. The post office is useful for something else. The former director of Knap knows about this, having collected more than four million crowns for leaving the director’s chair with a salary of over 300,000 crowns for having managed company to a loss of almost two billion crowns.

The post office lives only on substance

This is the main problem of the Czech Post. She is no longer the leader of parcel delivery. What it was originally intended for. Competitors have overtaken it both in the volume of transported shipments and in the flexibility and quality of services. For many years, the Post Office has lived only on its essence and its brand. I go to the post office.

At the same time, even if it doesn’t seem like it, the post office has potential. It owns more than three thousand one-hundred-year-old buildings, on which it founded its business during the Austro-Hungarian era. But that time is over. Now they sell a few each year and use the proceeds to mask their dire business results.

Selling the “black hole” in Jindřišská would be the right step. The struggling Czech Post can make billions

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The sale of the building in Prague’s Jindřišská Street can bring Czech Post billions of crowns. Tens of millions of taxpayers’ crowns are currently disappearing into this “black hole” every year, warns Trinity Bank’s Chief Economist Lukáš Kovanda.

Lukáš Kovanda

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The managers of the post office may not have noticed that during the time they were sitting in the chair in the office of the historic building in Jindřišská street, the internet, payment cards and similar conveniences were created. To justify their existence, they offer lottery tickets. The worst part is that they noticed. But they let the development float around them with their salaries.

A good reason to close branches

At the same time, the Post Office owns one golden egg. And that is logistics centers. Places where parcels are sorted and letters and parcels are sent to the destination address. Now the government is thinking of selling this one key capability of the post office. To so-called save the post office. And regular state subsidies fed the last two delegated powers of the post office, i.e. Ivan Langer’s Czech Point and data boxes.

David Ondráčka: How does Česká pošta cancel branches? From the table

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Česká pošta and other interested parties in its transformation are acting in a non-conceptual way. Branches are being canceled without knowledge of local specifics, in Prague and from the table, writes anti-corruption expert and former head of the Czech branch of Transparency International David Ondráčka in his contribution for Newstream.

David Ondračka

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The post office now stands at a crossroads. Minister of the Interior Vít Rakušan currently has the greatest influence on its future development. The curse of the post office has always been and is the fact that it is in the thrall of the winning politician. Mail is, metaphorically speaking, the severed head of a defeated opponent. Managing a company according to a political assignment is a challenge for managers balanced by those huge rewards.

The Austrian has appointed several lawyers to the supervisory board, who are already monitoring the flow of money. It’s an open secret that money from the post office not only goes to executive bonuses, but also through consulting and marketing contracts. That’s how it’s always been, and politicians are drooling over this reward for an election result.

Postmen laid off from three hundred branches can only chatter about it in pubs.

According to the latest annual report of the Post Office, last year’s revenues decreased by one billion crowns year-on-year to fifteen billion. Indebtedness with banks is also in the order of billions of crowns. Management therefore has a good economic reason to proceed with branch closures. However, the background of the end of Czech Post is different.

Lukáš Kovanda: Czech Post will cancel hundreds of branches. If the banks can do it, so can she

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Česká pošta has decided to take a step that is practically necessary in its unfavorable economic situation: it will cancel approximately three hundred of its branches. We already know which ones they are. Of course, the affected municipalities and their mayors speak up. They don’t like it. Which is understandable. People in a village or town often blame the cancellation of a post office branch on the local mayor much more than the management of the company, or even the Ministry of the Interior, “somewhere far away in Prague”.

Lukáš Kovanda

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Read more comments of the (in)correct Dalibor Martínek here