Switzerland has kept its top spot in the Universal Postal Union’s annual ranking of 170 countries in the recently released Postal Development Report 2020.
Swiss Post scored a maximum 100 points with the report stressing its balanced and superior performance in every dimension of postal development. According to the report, in 2019, Swiss Post made further progress in reliability and relevance, while retaining its already excellent performance in reach and resilience.
Speaking about Swiss Post’s success, the director general of the Universal Postal Union, Bishar A Hussein, said, “My sincere congratulations to Swiss Post. They are a bright beacon for the rest of the international postal sector and an outlier for innovation and creativity.”
Elsewhere in the report, Austrian Post moved up four positions to take the second spot with a total score of 95.3. This was achieved, the report says, through significant improvements in reach, relevance and resilience, in addition to high performance in the area of reliability.
Maintaining its third place, Germany and Deutsche Post DHL Group scored 94.2 points, with the report stating that Germany has managed to consolidate its position and offers a balanced performance and a slight improvement in reliability.
The Integrated Index for Postal Development (also known as 2IPD) draws on a wide range of postal big data — nearly 23 billion records since 2013 — to create a detailed picture of postal development globally. Each country is assessed on four key pillars: reliability, reach, relevance and resilience. Inputs are integrated into an algorithm delivering a general score from 0-100 for each country.
The report also identifies five regional champions: Singapore (10th), Poland (13th), Brazil (45th), Tunisia (46th), and Ghana (57th).
As well as the postal index, the Postal Development Report 2020 contains an examination of the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on postal operations. The report found that operators with the most resilient business models prior to the crisis fared best. It notes that even these operators will remain highly dependent on the growth of e-commerce and the wider economic situation in their countries.