The future of postal services is bright  : Director-UPU in his interview:- 

Mr.Bishar Hussain
UPU Direcor

Established in 1874, the Universal Postal Union (UPU) is the second oldest agency of the United Nations. It became a specialised agency of the United Nations on 1 July 1948. As such, the UPU contributes to the development of UN policies and activities that have a direct link with its mandate and missions to promote social and economic development.

The UPU is one of the smallest organisations in the UN system with an annual budget of around 40 million US dollars. Its secretariat, the International Bureau, based in Berne, employs some 220 employees from all over the world to oversee the work of the Union in a wide range of areas. These include measures that range from helping member countries improve their quality of postal services to developing postal e-services and managing relationships with international customs, airlines and standardisation bodies to speed up the dispatch, processing and delivery of global postal services.  The current Director-General of the UPU, Bishar A. Hussein, was appointed at the 25th Universal Postal Congress in October 2012, and he took office in January 2013. In an interview with the UN News Centre, M. Hussein talks about the future of postal services.

UN News Centre: In light of the increasing use of electronic mail, what is the future of traditional postal services?

Bishar Hussein: First of all we have to define what we call “traditional postal services”. These include much more than the letter, parcels, packages and other postal items. When we talk of postal services they are all inclusive. The future of postal services is bright, contrary to what some people may think. In 2011, the postal services in the world processed 368 billion letters, and close to 6.4 billion parcels across a very wide network of 660.000 post offices with nearly five million employees. This is the extent of our network and our services. This is not a business that is going to go away anytime soon. However, we recognise that there has been some decline in the physical mail sector worldwide, which can be linked to some extent to the electronic substitution. We have seen substantial growth in the parcel business which can be linked to the development of e-commerce. We had also had significant growth in the postal financial services and to sum it up, advances in telecommunication technology has always had an impact on the traditional postal business, however the post has always had the ability to adapt to any new changes in the sector and come up with new innovating products and services. I am confident that the World’s post will definitely be able to adapt to the current challenges and that traditional postal services will continue to grow and thrive in the future.

//upu news 15thmay2013//