The U.S. Postal Service announced Monday that it lost $2 billion in its most recent quarter, despite some positive signs for the cash-strapped agency's bottom line.
ADVERTISEMENT
The USPS’s revenue grew by some $327 million over the same period last year, a jump of 2 percent. The revenue increase was largely driven by shipments of packages, an area where the agency has even expanded into Sunday service. Package revenue grew 6.6 percent this most recent quarter, as more people turned to online shopping.
Volume for first-class mail, the Postal Service’s most popular product, declined once more, marking a full eight years of quarterly drops.
But revenue for first-class mail increased 3.2 percent, due to an emergency price increase for stamps that the USPS was allowed to implement this year. Advertisers also used the mail more frequently, though the rate increase also mostly fueled the 5.1 percent increase in standard mail revenue.
“We’ve been effective in developing and marketing our products, and we’re improving how we leverage data and technology — all providing a higher return on mail for many customers and causing them to take a fresh look at the Postal Service,” Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe said in a statement.
Still, the agency’s losses in the most recent quarter far outstripped the USPS’s red ink from a year ago, when it lost $740 million between April and June.
Postal officials blamed the increased losses on a $1.5 billion increase in expenses, propelled by a jump in workers’ compensation costs. Without those new costs, caused by a change in interest rates, this quarter's losses would have been similar to 2013.
The Postal Service’s losses for the first nine months of the year have now climbed more than $4 billion, and senior officials said the tight financial situation had left them unable to make investments in the agency’s vehicle fleet and necessary parts of its infrastructure.
Read more: http://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/214812-usps-bleeds-another-2b
No comments:
Post a Comment