INTERVIEW: POS MALAYSIA CHANGE CHARLES BREWER, GROUP CEO OF POS MALAYSIA, TELLS HAZEL KING ABOUT THE POST’S HERITAGE, FINANCIAL CHALLENGES AND OPTIMISM ABOUT A MORE SUSTAINABLE FUTURE STATE OF W 22 ith a history dating back more than 200 years, Pos Malaysia is one of the oldest companies operating in Southeast Asia. It has a sizeable workforce of more than 16,000 people and is undergoing a significant digital and sustainable transformation project, evolving from “a mail company that also delivers parcels to being a parcels company that also delivers mail”, according to the post’s group CEO, Charles Brewer. As is the current global trend, Pos Malaysia has seen a steady decline in lettermail in recent years – between 7% and 8% a year according to Brewer – but it is still required as part of the universal service obligation to deliver to more than 11 million addresses across Malaysia every day. This, along with an increasingly competitive parcel market, has resulted in a clear need to diversify the service portfolio with the goal of delivering a sustainable and profitable fiscal position. “We haven’t delivered a profit since 2019,” Brewer reveals. “However, we have managed to continually and successfully reduce the loss year over year by 11% in 2021, by 18% in 2022 and 51% in 2023 by tackling the low-hanging fruit opportunities, merging mail and parcel networks, driving up productivity and changing our business models, but we still have work to do. “We’re incredibly diversified now. At our core is of course mail and parcel, but we also have Pos Aviation, which provides ‘above and below’ the wing services, including inflight catering – where we produce more than 11 million meals a day. We have a logistics division which, along with providing traditional 3PL supply chain solutions, also has two ships that carry coal to and from Indonesia. We have Pos Ar-Rahnu, which provides retail pawnbroking for gold, and we have Pos Digicert, which is rapidly growing to provide software-as-a-service and digital consulting solutions,” he continues. www.ParcelandPostalTechnologyInternational.com September 2024
Parcel and Postal Technology International Parcel and Postal Technology International September 2024: Page 22
