World Post Day, 9 October 2024

Statement by the Director General of the UPU International Bureau: “150 years of enabling communication and empowering peoples across nations”

As we celebrate 150 years of the Universal Postal Union (UPU), we recognize its importance as one of the earliest examples of multilateralism. Founded with the goal of creating a unified postal system, the UPU has brought together countries to support global communication, cultural exchange, and access to essential services. What started with 22 nations now includes 192 member countries, showing the strength of international cooperation.

Over the years, the UPU has adapted to challenges like wars, crises, and rapid technological changes. It has remained a strong symbol of global unity, ensuring communication is accessible to everyone, especially the most vulnerable.

Today, the UPU leads efforts to modernize and improve postal services. It provides a space for countries to share knowledge, find new solutions, and address modern challenges. The UPU's spirit of cooperation helps turn obstacles into opportunities, making sure postal services evolve with the changing world.

Where once we viewed the rise of digital communication and the decline in traditional mail volumes as a threat, we now see a wealth of possibilities. The UPU's extensive network has adapted to support a broader range of services – including e-commerce, financial, social and digital services – ensuring inclusive access for people worldwide, including in the most remote areas in order to leave no-one behind.

Instead of viewing competition as a challenge, the UPU welcomes partnerships with a wide range of stakeholders. This inclusive approach strengthens our ability to address global challenges, like climate change, which requires cooperation across borders.

As we look to the future, the UPU’s mission remains clear: to connect and empower people around the world. By staying committed to multilateralism, innovation, and inclusivity, the UPU will continue to support global communication and serve future generations for the next 150 years.

Enabling communication and empowering people’s better life with omnipresent postal services

Message from Chairman Liu Aili of China Post Group Corporation Limited

On the occasion when the whole nation is celebrating the 75th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, we usher in the 55th World Post Day. On behalf of China Post Group, I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to the governments at all levels, customers, and friends from all walks of life for their long-term support. I would also like to extend my greetings to the active and retired postal staff nationwide.

As a significant public utility of a country, and a fundamental, strategic and leading industry of the national economy, the postal sector plays an important role in facilitating equal accessibility of public services, promoting unimpeded economic circulation, and boosting the flow of production factors. Since the beginning of this year, we have been unwaveringly following the guidance of Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, fully implementing the guiding principles from the 20th CPC National Congress and the second and third plenary sessions of the 20th CPC Central Committee. We have been constantly building our core competitive advantages and pushing forward the implementation of our strategic tasks, and have eventually made remarkable achievements. We ranked 83rd on the Fortune Global 500 list and first among global postal operators in terms of revenues and profits. Among the winners of the 2023 Integrated Index for Postal Development (2IPD), China was honored with the UPU Regional Champion in Asia-Pacific thanks to its achievements in the four dimensions of postal development including postal reliability, reach, relevance and resilience.

We have been committed to high quality development, and achieved steady growth in business performance. We improved the quality of universal postal service and met relevant requirements. We continued to advance the transformation of the postal outlets, expand business categories, and enrich the contents of universal postal service. We made great efforts to enhance the time limit of the parcel, express and logistics business, reduce its costs, expand its market, and develop its capacity, thus accelerating to build up its competitive edge. We strived to implement PSBC’s tasks of supporting the real economy, fending off financial risks and deepening financial reform, enabling PSBC to remain China’s fifth largest state-owned bank in terms of total assets, and rank 12th among Top 1000 World Banks in tier one capital. We improved the professional capabilities of China Post Life Insurance, deepen its value growth, making it possible to rank among the top five in the industry in terms of premiums and value of new business. From January to August this year, China Post Group generated a revenue of 472.171 billion yuan (about 67.28 billion US dollars) and a profit of 70.476 billion yuan (about 10.04 billion US dollars), maintaining a sound momentum of development.

We have been committed to serving the overall situation of the country, and gave full play to our role as a national team. We went all out to support rural revitalization, striving to address the difficulties in sales, logistics and financing in agriculture and rural areas. With the goal of systematically promoting large-scale operation, we accelerated promoting the “one policy for one product”, “one policy for one industry” and “one policy for one category” initiative based on rural industries with local features and key customer groups. We continued to enhance the capacity of rural logistics network, and constantly improved the postal inclusive financial system. We fully supported the Belt and Road Initiative and major regional strategies of the country, and played an active role in serving the new development pattern.

We have been committed to tackling tough problems of reform, and constantly improve our competitiveness. We successfully launched our first intercontinental air route from Nanjing to Luxembourg, and made breakthroughs in opening the air route to the United States, thereby taking solid steps forward in building an independent and controllable international logistics system. We broke the barriers among administrative divisions and made overall plans for the land and air transportation networks in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, thus accelerating integrated delivery services in this region. We did solid work in classified accounting and settlement, and pushed forward universal-competitive postal service separation in an active yet prudent way. We comprehensively deepened the reform of parcel, express and logistics service, and effectively improved the efficiency of supervision, operation and resources.

We have been committed to innovation-driven development, and made remarkable achievements in technology empowerment. We deeply promoted the development of China Post into a Digital Post. We made comprehensive efforts to apply digital technology to the parcel, express and logistics business, accelerated to promote the transformation from labor-intensive operation into intelligent and unmanned operation, from “sweat logistics” into “smart logistics”, effectively ensuring time limit reduction, cost cut, efficiency increase and operation control. We sped up the iteration of PSBC’s new core system, and comprehensively rolled out its “cloud counter” service mode. We quickened our steps to apply home-made software and hardware, make the key technologies independent and controllable, and create new quality productive forces of China Post with digitization and intelligence as the core. In the 2023 China Digital Innovation Awards, China Post won the award for digital influence enterprises.

To mark the 150th anniversary of the Universal Postal Union (UPU), the World Post Day theme for 2024 is: “150 years of enabling communication and empowering peoples across nations”, which reflects the responsibilities of Posts as the world’s largest physical service network for promoting communication and empowering people’s better life in different countries. All good principles should adapt to changing times to remain relevant. As President Xi Jinping pointed out, only by following the trend of history, responding to changes proactively, and seeking changes actively, can we keep pace with the times. Facing the new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation, and standing at the new starting point of the 150th anniversary, China Post will forge ahead with all parties for continuous growth, always keep pace with the times and serve the people wholeheartedly. We will win recognition with our high-quality development and services, build a better future with efficient reform and high-level innovation, ensure unimpeded communication, and deliver beauty and happiness with omnipresent postal networks!

We will empower people’s better life with our high-quality development. We will take the initiative to fulfill the functions entrusted to China Post by the CPC Central Committee, and continue to give full play to the leading and essential role of universal postal service in facilitating equal accessibility of public services, give full play to the role of the parcel, express and logistics business as a main force in the industry that is trustworthy in critical moments, and give full play to the role of PSBC as a main force in serving the real economy and a cornerstone in upholding financial stability. We will promote the high-quality development of our main business while fulfilling our core functions and building our core competitiveness, and meet the people’s demands for postal services in pursuing their better lives.

We will empower communication and circulation with better service. We will continue to improve our service network integrating land and air transport, covering the whole country and reaching the world, and fully leverage our capacity advantages of 120,000 mail trucks and 42 all-cargo aircraft, as well as our channel advantages of 174 gateways worldwide. We will continue to strengthen bilateral and multilateral exchanges and cooperation with the Posts in different countries and territories under the UPU framework, and make contributions to the economic and social development of countries and regions around the world with a connected and efficient postal network. We will fully leverage the innate resource advantages of China Post in the integrated flow of commodity, logistics, capital and information to systematically facilitate rural revitalization. We will better the commercial circulation system in counties to address difficulties in sales, strengthen the mail and express delivery system in rural areas to address difficulties in logistics, improve the inclusive financial system to address difficulties in financing, thereby boosting the integration of small rural industries into the economic flows, facilitating the sales of agricultural products to the national market, and contributing to unblocking the national and international transport artery and smoothing the micro-circulation of local economy.

We will empower the construction of core advantages with efficient reform. We will thoroughly implement the guiding principles from the third plenary session of the 20th CPC Central Committee, systematically drive China Post to deepen reform comprehensively, and accelerate the construction of a high-standard market-oriented system in line with best practices. We will give full play to the decisive role of the market in resource allocation, and enable the optimal efficiency of resource allocation and maximum profits. We will make solid efforts to promote the standardization system, optimize the operation and management system, improve the service quality control system, and comprehensively build a risk management and control system, thereby modernizing the governance system and governance capacity. We will continue to pursue universal-competitive postal service separation at a swift and steady pace, consistently deepen the reform of the parcel, express and logistics business, and stimulate driving force and vitality and build up core advantages through reform, thereby securing the higher-quality, more efficient and more sustainable development.

We will empower transformation with digitalization and intelligence. We will quicken our steps to foster a new quality productive force system, and promote the construction of a Digital Post. Oriented to the direction of solving major and specific problems by digital and intelligent means, we will continue to integrate business and technology, push forward agile development and rapid iteration of IT to meet business needs, and drive business innovation and transformation through sci-tech progress. We will gather all production factors to develop new quality productive forces, comprehensively empower business development and management improvement, thereby achieving groundbreaking technological advancements, innovative distribution of production factors, and profound industrial transformation and upgrading.

The great cause is as solid and long-lasting as a stone, and those who follow such a cause enjoy boundless vision. Following the guidance of Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, China Post will remain true to its founding mission of serving the people, continue to deepen reform and innovation, accelerate high-quality development, strive to facilitate the “dual circulation” of domestic and overseas markets, comprehensively empower people’s pursuit of a better life, and make new and greater contributions to advancing Chinese modernization and realizing national rejuvenation.