PostNL: Running a Postal Company When Mail Is Disappearing and the State Won’t Pay

PostNL is a logistics company trying to run a profitable parcel network while carrying a letter-post obligation that loses money every year, and in 2025 and 2026 it decided it could no longer do both without state help. The company, spun out of TNT in 2011 and led by chief executive Pim Berendsen, the former finance chief who succeeded Herna Verhagen, reported 2025 revenue of €3.3 billion and normalised EBIT of €53 million, with the Mail in the Netherlands segment contributing €2 million for the year after being deeply negative for eleven months. It requested €30 million for 2025 and €38 million for 2026 to cover the net cost of the universal service, was turned down by the caretaker economic affairs minister, Vincent Karremans, and on 5 September 2025 asked to be stripped of its designation as the universal service provider altogether. In October 2026, with a new Postal Act still unpassed, it applied for €80 million for 2027. This article explains how the mail business collapsed, why parcels are not the easy answer they once seemed, and what the 2025 and 2026 numbers say about the company’s Breakthrough 2028 strategy. It is part of the Netherlands Company Stories hub.

How did the Dutch mail business collapse?

Dutch addressed mail has fallen by about 70 per cent since 2009, and by about 35 per cent since 2019 alone, because bank statements, bills, government correspondence and personal letters have moved to email, apps and the government’s digital mailbox, leaving PostNL with a fixed network of letterboxes, sorting centres and deliverers serving a shrinking stream of items. The company’s own figure for 2025 was a decline of 8.3 per cent in the second quarter and 7.9 per cent in the first half of 2026 excluding election mail; it expects the trend to continue at 8 to 10 per cent a year.

The economics of mail are almost entirely fixed cost. A deliverer walks the same street whether there are three letters or thirty for it, a sorting centre must run whether it processes a million items or half a million, and the universal service obligation requires PostNL to maintain more than 10,000 orange letterboxes, many of which, as the company’s mail director Maurice Unck put it in October 2026, are increasingly empty. As volume falls, unit cost rises, and because stamp prices are regulated by the Authority for Consumers and Markets, PostNL cannot simply charge what the service costs. The stamp rose to €1.31 in July 2025, the biggest increase in a decade, and still did not close the gap.

The result was a segment that lost money for most of 2025. Letter-post losses rose to €20 million in the first half of 2025 from €6 million a year earlier, PostNL wrote down €40 million of goodwill on Mail in the Netherlands in the second quarter, and the segment was deeply negative after eleven months before non-recurring government and pension-fund mailings, election mail and a December stamp campaign pulled the full-year result to a positive €2 million. The company estimated the net cost of the universal service at about €30 million for 2025, a figure its own newsroom later described as a €35 million loss on the obligation.

The structural problem is shared by every incumbent post in Europe, but the Netherlands is extreme because its population is small, dense and digital. Denmark’s PostNord announced in 2025 that it would stop delivering letters, and Germany’s 2024 postal law allowed Deutsche Post to slow most letters to three days. The Netherlands, which liberalised its postal market earlier than most, in 2009, has been slower to reform the obligation it wrote at the time.

What happened with Sandd and why does it still matter?

PostNL’s 2019 takeover of Sandd, its last competitor in addressed mail, gave it a monopoly that regulators never approved, and in 2026 that history came back as a new investigation by the competition authority ACM. In 2019 PostNL agreed to buy Sandd, for a reported price of about €130 million, to consolidate two loss-making networks into one; ACM blocked the deal, but the economic affairs minister at the time, Eric Wiebes, overruled the regulator on public-interest grounds and granted a licence with conditions. A Rotterdam court ruled in 2020 that the ministers had been wrong to approve the merger, and the licence was later annulled by the Administrative High Court for Trade and Industry, although by then the networks had been merged and could not be unpicked.

For six years the licence conditions capped PostNL’s prices and governed its treatment of competitors. When they expired in 2025, the door-to-door advertising distributor Spotta applied for a licence to deliver addressed advertising mail, with its chief executive Yme Pastma pledging €20 million of investment, the first attempt at competition since Sandd. In February 2026 ACM announced a new investigation into PostNL following the court ruling, which PostNL said would not help a market that had already been investigated repeatedly and had changed beyond recognition, with volumes down 35 per cent since 2019 and costs sharply higher.

The monopoly also complicates PostNL’s relationship with its largest customer, the state. In May 2026 the Belastingdienst, the tax office, reported PostNL to ACM for alleged market distortion after a tender for a four-year contract covering mail for more than 100 government bodies, about 260 million items a year or nearly a fifth of PostNL’s volume, collapsed in December 2025 when PostNL refused to commit to two-day delivery for business mail. The retender was expected to cost €210 million more than the original estimate of just over €456 million. PostNL called the market-distortion claim objectionable and blamed contradictory government demands, and in September 2026 it announced that it would continue to deliver the majority of Dutch government mail from January 2027. In May 2026 ACM also fined the company almost €7 million for missing its 2023 delivery targets, the sixth consecutive year it had failed the next-day standard, which PostNL called disproportionate.

What did PostNL ask the state for, and what did it get?

PostNL asked the Dutch state in 2025 for €68 million of compensation, €30 million for 2025 and €38 million for 2026, to cover the net cost of the universal service obligation, and it got a refusal, two court defeats on interim payments, and a relaxation of the delivery standard that it said was too little and too late. The company’s legal argument rests on the EU Postal Directive, which entitles a universal service provider to compensation when the obligation imposes an unfair financial burden, and on the fact that it cannot simply stop delivering letters, because the obligation is statutory.

The sequence ran through 2025. In June, after ACM’s proposal and ministerial consultation, PostNL called the government’s universal service proposal unworkable, structurally loss-making and not economically viable. On 30 June, Karremans extended the standard delivery time from 24 to 48 hours, a change MPs had earlier rejected but which he implemented anyway; PostNL welcomed it but said it did not fix the finances. In July the company warned it might sue; in August it filed an urgent case seeking an advance and a quick ruling, having reported a net loss of €41 million for the first half. On 5 September the appeal court refused the €30 million advance, finding no evidence of acute financial distress and noting that the government could scale back the obligation further. The same day PostNL formally requested that the minister withdraw its designation as the universal service provider and asked for a response within two months.

The government’s answer, in effect, has been to change the service rather than pay for it. The House of Representatives approved delivery within two days from July 2026 and within three days a year later, and the first step took effect on 12 July 2026. PostNL wants to go further: delivery on three days a week, Tuesday to Friday, with no Saturday round, which it says could start no earlier than early 2028 and only if parliament decides by January 2027. In October 2026 the company applied for €80 million in compensation for 2027, saying the three-year net cost of the obligation would exceed €148 million, while the proceedings over 2025 and 2026 continue.

The political obstacle is that the Postal Act bill has been in parliament since 2020 and has been repeatedly postponed, most recently during the 2025 cabinet collapse and the formation that followed. Mail is a sensitive subject for older voters and rural constituencies, and no minister has wanted to be the one who ended Saturday post.

Why are parcels no longer the easy answer?

Parcels were supposed to replace mail as PostNL’s profit engine, and they did through the pandemic, but since 2023 the Dutch parcel market has grown more slowly, competition has intensified, labour costs have risen and in 2026 the cross-border flow from Asian web shops reversed. PostNL delivers about 1.2 million parcels on an average weekday, and parcel revenue in the fourth quarter of 2025 rose 3.2 per cent on flat volumes thanks to price increases; but in the first half of 2026 E-commerce revenue fell to €937 million from €961 million as volumes dropped 6.4 per cent, with domestic volume down 4.2 per cent and international volume down almost 15 per cent.

The international drop has a specific cause. Orders from Asia-based platforms such as Temu and Shein, which had flooded European parcel networks since 2023, fell sharply in 2026 ahead of new EU import rules for e-commerce shipments worth up to €150, which took effect on 1 July 2026 and brought such parcels into the customs-duty net; PostNL added a €3 surcharge on all parcels from outside the EU from the same date. The company had already suspended shipments to the United States in August 2025 when the US ended its own de minimis exemption and reopened them in September once customs procedures were clarified. The Platforms segment, which includes the asset-light cross-border brands Spring and MyParcel, saw volumes fall 7.1 per cent in the first half of 2026 as European growth was offset by lower Asian and mail volumes.

Domestically the market is crowded. DHL, DPD, GLS, Amazon’s own network and the Belgian post’s Dutch operations all compete for web-shop contracts, and PostNL reported that client concentration was rising and that its market share had slipped slightly, as expected, in 2025. Its response is to shift from volume to value: steering shippers from next-day to best-day delivery, which lets it charge a premium for speed, raising the average price per parcel, up 5 per cent in the first half of 2026, and pushing consumers towards out-of-home collection at lockers and shops, which is cheaper than doorstep delivery. The company has about 1,400 automated lockers and plans 3,600 by the end of 2028; it opened them to FedEx in June 2025.

In Belgium, where PostNL has run a parcel network under its own brand since 2013, the business is a smaller version of the Dutch one, competing with bpost on its home ground. It is not reported separately, and the strategy documents in 2025 and 2026 did not single it out.

What do the 2025 and 2026 results show?

PostNL’s 2025 results were a company meeting a low bar: it delivered its outlook of normalised EBIT in line with 2024, at €53 million on revenue of €3.3 billion, achieved its cost-savings target with €24 million of savings in the fourth quarter alone, proposed a dividend of €0.04 per share, and guided to normalised EBIT of €40 to €70 million for 2026 with free cash flow between zero and minus €30 million. No interim dividend was paid in 2025 because of the uncertainty over the postal service.

The first half of 2026 was described by Berendsen as resilient. Group revenue was stable at €1,589 million, normalised EBIT slightly higher, and free cash flow significantly improved, which allowed the company to confirm its full-year guidance. Mail revenue held at €623 million because price rises offset the 7.9 per cent volume decline, and the switch to two-day delivery was completed with €12 million of savings. E-commerce delivered €24 million of savings despite lower volumes. The company announced about €75 million of additional savings for 2027 and 2028, mainly in E-commerce, and said it expected 2026 to be the inflection point towards its 2028 ambition.

The distance between €53 million of EBIT and the €175 million target is the whole story. Closing it requires the mail reform to pass, the cost savings to land and parcel pricing to hold in a market that is, for now, shrinking.

What is the Breakthrough 2028 strategy?

Breakthrough 2028, presented at a capital markets day on 17 September 2025, reorganises PostNL into three segments from January 2026, E-commerce, Platforms and Mail, and sets financial targets for 2028 of revenue above €4 billion, normalised EBIT above €175 million, free cash flow above €75 million and a return on invested capital above 12 per cent, with capital spending of about €150 million a year, mostly on the out-of-home network and on data and technology including AI. Chief financial officer Linde Jansen framed the plan around disciplined execution, margin improvement and capital efficiency.

The E-commerce segment is the domestic parcel business and is being steered from a volume strategy to a value strategy: segmented pricing by customer type, best-day rather than next-day delivery as the default, and a push to lockers and pick-up points. Selma Postma was appointed managing director of E-commerce in February 2026. Platforms groups the cross-border brands Spring and MyParcel and is meant to grow internationally without owning networks, by selling software and consolidation services to web shops shipping across Europe; the Too Good To Go food-waste app chose a PostNL warehouse in 2026 to scale in Germany and Austria. Mail is to become, in the company’s phrase, a future-proof postal service, which depends on parliament.

The plan also includes services beyond delivery, such as energy and sustainability offerings for consumers, and an AI-first approach to operations. These are small today. The more consequential operational shift is the move to out-of-home delivery, which PostNL says it wants to make as easy as home delivery; the company’s lockers and its 2,000th electric van, delivered in March 2026, with 39 per cent of last-mile delivery emission-free in the first half of 2026, are the visible parts of that programme.

Labour relations have been steadier than at KLM: a new collective agreement for mail deliverers was approved by union members in July 2026, and negotiations on the main PostNL agreement and the Saturday deliverers’ agreement began in October 2026. The Saturday round is itself the subject of the reform debate, which gives those talks an unusual edge.

How does PostNL compare with other European posts?

PostNL is unusual among European incumbents in being fully private, listed and without a state shareholder, which makes the compensation fight more adversarial than it would be in Belgium, where the state owns a majority of bpost, in France, where La Poste is state-owned, or in Germany, where the government holds about a fifth of DHL Group. When the Dutch state privatised PTT Post in the 1990s and the TNT group split in 2011, it kept the universal service obligation on the private company and relied on regulation and licence conditions rather than ownership to protect the public interest.

Other countries have moved faster to shrink the obligation. Denmark’s PostNord announced in 2025 that it would withdraw from letter delivery, leaving the residual service to a private operator; Germany’s 2024 postal law allowed Deutsche Post to deliver most letters within three days rather than one; Belgium’s bpost has reduced the frequency of non-priority mail rounds. The Dutch reform, to two days in 2026 and three in 2027, is in that direction but has taken longer because the enabling law is stuck.

PostNL’s parcel strategy, by contrast, is conventional. Every incumbent is pushing lockers, pricing by delivery speed and asset-light cross-border services, and every one is exposed to the same Asian platforms and the same EU customs changes. The company’s advantage is density: the Netherlands is the most compact large consumer market in Europe, and a network that serves it well has a cost per stop that few rivals can match. That density is also why the market attracted domestic e-commerce champions such as bol and Coolblue, both of which are among PostNL’s largest customers and both of which have built or considered their own delivery capacity, which is the concentration risk the company flags.

What can founders and investors learn from PostNL?

PostNL illustrates what happens when a business inherits a public obligation its revenue can no longer support, and when the replacement business turns out to be competitive rather than monopolistic. Four lessons apply well beyond postal services.

First, a statutory obligation is a liability that the market will eventually price. For a decade PostNL treated the universal service as a cost of doing business, offset by its monopoly in mail; once volumes fell far enough, the obligation became the single largest drag on the company, and the legal route to compensation has proved slow and uncertain. Founders in regulated sectors, from health insurance to telecoms, should model the point at which an obligation stops being affordable and plan the renegotiation before it arrives, because the state moves at the speed of parliament, not of the business.

Second, do not assume the replacement business is a monopoly. Parcels looked like mail’s natural successor, but the parcel market is open, capital-light at the margin and dominated by the buying power of a handful of web shops. PostNL’s 2025 admission that client concentration was rising and share slipping is the honest statement of a company that has moved from a protected market to a contested one.

Third, external shocks hit asset-light businesses too. Platforms was meant to be PostNL’s low-risk growth engine, but it depended on cross-border flows that US and EU customs changes cut by 15 per cent within a year. Asset-light does not mean risk-light; it means the risk is in volume rather than in capital.

Fourth, when a strategy depends on a political decision, say so plainly and set a deadline. PostNL’s statement that it needs a decision by January 2027 for a 2028 change is the right way to handle a dependency it does not control: it puts the cost of delay on the record. Investors reading the 2028 targets should treat the mail component as contingent and value the company on E-commerce and Platforms alone until the Postal Act passes. For the freight and infrastructure side of the same logistics sector, the Port of Rotterdam story shows a public asset with the opposite problem: steady revenue and a shrinking industrial customer base.

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