Pitney Bowes directing its focus to the shipping industry

Christoph Stehmann
Executive Vice President, International, 
SMB Solutions – Pitney Bowes Global

Pitney Bowes is a global technology company that provides commerce solutions in the areas of ecommerce, shipping, mailing, and data. Clients around the world, including 90 percent of the Fortune 500, rely on the accuracy and precision delivered by Pitney Bowes solutions, analytics, and APIs in the areas of ecommerce fulfilment, shipping and returns; cross-border ecommerce;presort services; office mailing and shipping; location data; and software. Currently Pitney Bowes offerings are available in 20 markets across Asia, Europe and Americas. 

The history of Pitney Bowes started with inventing the postage meter in 1920 and that subsequently invented the mailing industry. For nearly 100 years Pitney Bowes has been innovating and delivering technologies that remove the complexity of getting commerce transactions precisely right. 

If we look at the company’s product composition 10 years ago, 60-70 % of its revenues came from its mailing business. However with physical mailing declining globally, Pitney Bowes is gradually directing its focus in the shipping space. Today, 50% of the company’s revenues come from the traditional mailing business while the other 50% is into shipping, which is a growth market.

“The shipping market in India and globally indeed looks very promising,” says Christoph Stehmann, Executive Vice President, International, SMB Solutions – Pitney Bowes Global. “Globally the shipping growth rate is 10%, driven mostly by ecommerce. The US which happens to be our home market is the biggest market, but the markets in Europe and Asia are also equally promising. Pitney Bowes has made some of the biggest investments in shipping; we made 2 major acquisitions in last 4 years – Newgistics, which we acquired last year is a logistics company specializing in ecommerce and technology around Returns; we also acquired Borderfree 3-4 years back  that specializes in cross border ecommerce,” he says.

Solution offerings for the shipping industry…

As far as solutions are concerned, it always depends on the local market requirements of what solutions Pitney should bring into the market. “If you look from a global perspective, the biggest thing we do is cross-border ecommerce. We are basically helping facilitate shipments across borders; in many circumstances buyers and sellers do not understand the regulations for customs and tariffs and there happens to be many export restrictions. So we try to manage these things for the customers. We have a network for facilitating these shipments and have defined rate cards that facilitate these shipments,” says Christoph. 

The second big area for Pitney is Shipping APIs - ecommerce sellers do not write the labels with hands but they use software. Behind that software sits a web-based service that integrates the shipping information directly into the system. Pitney Bowes is currently providing this in the USA. 

Returns is another big focus for Pitney Bowes, especially in the USA returns constitute over 50% of the total shipments made. “We try to ensure that a seamless return process is key to the buyer’s buying decision. Many buyers would not make a purchase if they are sure that they cannot return the goods safely. So that’s a big business for us,” he asserts.

Pitney Bowes also has solutions for multi-carrier shipments; if people use more than 1 carrier to ship it to different areas, there has to be a decision made of which carrier to give which parcel. So the company has to keep a log of that, which is not easier to do it through a system. Additionally, Rate comparison again becomes a challenge here.  Pitney Bowes provides the customers with the possibility to manage multiple carriers.

“We see different competition in different markets for different segments. Like for cross-border shipping, there is some competition from the big carriers. 

However we believe that we have a big advantage there, as we have a certain size and the way our system works, we get better with every shipments over time. Since it is still a fragmented and a growing market, there is a room for everyone to grow,” explains Christoph.

India is one of the stronger markets. According to the Pitney Bowes Parcel Shipping Index,though India shipped just 1 parcel per person in 2017, the market grew 15 percent YOY reaching a total of 1.5 billion parcels shipped.