Present:

At present Australia Post is a government-owned company.  They provide reliable postage to all of Australia and the world. In the past Australia Post, as with many government-owned companies, ran at a loss, but recently Australia Post generated about $3 billion a year. It has become a good asset to the government.

Today Australia Post is focused on its customers. As a result of this there are many services that they have begun in the last 10 years and are now available. These are: POSTbillpay, RegisteredPOST, Letter Services, Parcel Services, International, ExpressServices, FinancialService, Logistics, Hybrid Mail, Databases, Specialised (which includes Passport, Change of Address, Mail Withdrawal, For The Blind, Defence Mail, C.O.D, Boxes&Bags and RegPOST International) and EDI Post.

To provide these services Australia Post has over 32,000 employees working full time. These range from the designers of their web site (www.austpost.com.au) to the management staff, from people who deliver the mail and sort the mail to the people behind any of the 4,000 Australia Post shops.

One of the major areas of competition that Australia Post has had to deal with is that of e-mail. You may think that e-mail would greatly reduce the number of letters being sent and therefore threaten the company. However, the volume of letters that Australia Post handles each year has been, and is expected to continue to, increase by 3 or 4 percent each year. This is mainly due to a larger demand on their services from business.  As you may have expected, public letter volumes have dropped, but the more that public letter volumes drop the more businesses will be sending out letters and parcels due to e-commerce.

Even if you buy something on the Internet, it will still have to be delivered to you through the post. For this reason I, and Australia Post, believe that the postal business will continue to grow. Just remember that there are still some things that are harder, if not impossible, to send over the Internet. Things such as a person's style of handwriting and the hair dryer that you left on your last visit to your grandmother can't be sent over the Internet.

Another fact that will sway people the way of letters rather than e-mail is that the cost of sending a letter to anywhere in Australia has been the same since 1992 (45 Australian cents), and should remain the same for some time yet.