Statement of the Director General at the Opening Ceremony for World Post Day and the Awards Ceremony for 2IPD, 9 October 2020
Your Excellencies,
Distinguished Guests,
Colleagues,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
A very warm welcome to this opening ceremony to celebrate World Post Day, as well as the awards ceremony for the Integrated Index for Postal Development or “2IPD.”
Ladies and Gentlemen,
World Post Day is one of the most important days in the Universal Postal Union’s calendar.
And perhaps this year’s is one of the most important we have ever celebrated. The COVID-19 pandemic has touched every person on this planet, but I believe it will also bring irreversible changes to the postal sector.
UPU’s role in this change has never been clearer. Our duty is to ensure digital transformation and to reinvent the postal sector so it can deliver innovative, integrated and inclusive development solutions to the world.
There can be no going back—the new normal is here to stay!
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Let me turn to something very dear to me—the 2IPD awards for the year 2019. 2IPD has never been more crucial. The Index offers an essential tool for postal operators to gauge how far they have progressed in this new environment.
The postal sector also plays an important role in promoting socio-economic development and contributes to the achievement of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs.
2IPD provides a comparative picture of postal development across 170 countries in the 2020 ranking and draws on a wide range of postal big data—nearly 23 billion records since 2013—from numerous sources.
The Index is built on four key pillars and a number of sub-indicators. The four pillars are Reliability, Reach, Relevance and Resilience.
These four pillars provides a balanced view of postal development, without solely focusing on operational, strategic or societal matters. This enables the final score to comprehensively reflect the situation for postal services in any given geography.
Information is integrated into an algorithm delivering a general score between 0-100 for each country assessed. Using this score, it is then possible to group the countries into four distinct categories: postal champions, good performers, potential performers, and least developed operators.
This year the report also includes a review of the current COVID-19 pandemic and how it has impacted the international postal sector.
Allow me to highlight five points from the report’s examination of the pandemic’s effects:
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Reliability: The worldwide fall in air-travel severely impacted the postal sector. Today, the international logistics supply chain started converging back to more “normal” levels.
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The connectivity of the international postal network has not yet been fully restored.
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The crisis will test the relevance of the sector as the world still has to bridge the “postal development” divide.
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The operators that already have the most resilient business models prior to the crisis will fare better, but they will also remain highly dependent on the growth of e-commerce and the wider economic situation in their countries.
Returning to the awards, let’s now get to the truly exciting part and find out who the winners are!
Let me hand back to the moderator.