POST Fiji is looking to review the prices of its services, says CEO Dr Anirudha Bansod. Dr Bansod said they were reviewing revenue they received from the different products and services offered by the organisation.
“We have a wide range of products and a few of them is rather the mails, the EMS services, the parcel services, the philatelic, the smart mails, add post, we have the logistics,” he said.
“These are the predominantly important products and what happened is that currently I am going through a diagnosis — I was going through the products and some of them were not currently making enough money.
“Sometimes we go into losses as well but it does cover up from some of the other products but the question is the sustainability and we
can’t run to put few products into the losses.”
He said there was a need for a review which hadn’t been done for many years and it was time that they reviewed their pricing structure which they would put forward to the public.
“For a period of time the postal services have been declining and as we all know that people hardly send any letters, the only letters coming in are
business to business letters and etc,” added Dr Bansod.
“But apart from that the communication between the individuals are becoming email-centric or becoming electronic, social media.”
According to him the dynamics of the communication had changed and this was where their mail revenue dropped substantially.
“Whereas our postal operations in terms of our staffing and properties and asserts and machinery is constantly growing.
“That’s where the challenge is whether we reduce our cost of operations or whether we increase the revenue.
“It is one of the things that I really need to consider after getting the strength and weaknesses of all those propositions.”
The prices of Post Fiji have been extremely cheap over the years and competitive as according to Dr Bansod they charged 40 cents for a letter delivery.
“If you see the operations involved is cumbersome and tedious and then there is a lot of cost involved.
“Compared to that what we are charging definitely is not worthy commercially, and even if we increase the prices we will ensure the customers don’t get too much heat on to that because at the end of the day it is a government organisation and we are here to serve the people here.”
