Polish courier company InPost operates in 9 countries, with over 60,000 collection and delivery points. Most are in Poland (21,000), France (16,000), the UK (7,200), Spain (6,000), and Italy (5,000). In 2022, the company delivered 745 million shipments across Europe. 13.4 million in the UK alone.
No other Polish company is struggling to establish itself in Western Europe more strongly than InPost. Foreign expansion was a dream of its founder, Rafal Brzoska, more than a decade ago. In 2011, he even presented a very ambitious plan to launch 16,000 parcel machines across the continent. At the time, nothing came of it. The company had to focus on the Polish market and attracting an investor. For the past few years, it has also been developing more and more intensively in the West. Primarily in France, the UK, Spain and Italy.
InPost crossed the UK’s first necessary threshold of 1 thousand parcel machines in 2020. Today, it already has 6 thousand here, which is 1/4 of what it has in Poland. In Western Europe, there are more than 12 thousand of them. It means that the implementation of the plan from a decade ago is getting closer.
Foreign expansion model
In the meantime, however, the model of expansion abroad has changed somewhat. In addition to the parcel machines, InPost’s network includes pick-up points, the so-called PUDOs, which in Poland are used by the Żabka chain. For Rafal Brzoska, it’s core business in France, where in 2021 he made the largest acquisition in the history of Polish private business. For €513 million, he bought Mondial Relay. It had the second-largest parcel collection network (11,000 points), also operating in neighboring markets, Benelux and the Iberian Peninsula (4,000 points). Since then, InPost has doubled the PUDO network in Mondial Relay’s foreign markets. In France alone it has focused on introducing parcel machines. It already has almost 4 thousand of them there.
The third key market is Italy, where InPost appeared as early as 2014. Here, it is only developing a network of parcel machines, of which there are 1,500. Business is growing fastest in the entire group, however. This year, parcel volumes have increased 10-fold. To a large extent, this is the result of a low base. After 3 quarters, however, revenues reached €35 million, which are already higher than last year’s result in the UK. There was an acceleration here as well. Volumes and revenues doubled, and the company reached profitability in the third quarter. And now things are set to accelerate even further. In the summer, InPost acquired a 30% stake in courier company Menzles for £49.3 million. It’s fleet of 3,200 vehicles delivers parcels to 47,000 locations. The two companies can offer parcel delivery 360 days a year, a unique offering in the UK e-commerce market.
History
InPost entered the postal market in November 2006. The basis for the company’s creation was its infrastructure and technological facilities used for the distribution services. It was provided by Integer.pl Capital Group, to which InPost also belongs. The operation’s goal was to become a market runner, which was achieved in 2012. Then, InPost took over from Poczta Polska a 16% share of the market previously owned exclusively by the latter. However, the company installed its first parcel machine as early as 2009.
Due to the termination of the contract service for the courts at the beginning of 2016, the decline in letter mail volumes, and price pressure, InPost decided to restructure and then completely close the traditional letter mail business. Instead, the company decided to focus on its service business related to the e-commerce market. In 2019, the company launched the InPost Mobile application to remotely open boxes in Parcel Post. The application can be downloaded free of charge from Google Play, App Store, as well as Huawei AppGallery. It is currently used by nearly 10 million users.
More about InPost is here.
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