Insights

UPU State of the Postal Sector 2026: the second clock

Ahmed El-Alfy — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 22:20:41 GMT

The Universal Postal Union published its State of the Postal Sector 2026 on 8 October 2026, subtitled "Orchestrating a postal future". I think it is one of the most honest things the sector has published about itself. GN TEQ, where I work, has been a member of the UPU Consultative Committee since 2024, so I read all of it rather than the summary. Its central claim is that the sector is not badly informed. In the report's own words, it "decides too slowly on too narrow an option set".

Leaders in Logistics 2026: who connects the partners?

Ahmed El-Alfy — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 10:25:35 GMT

On Tuesday afternoon at Leaders in Logistics: Autumn 2026, at the Business Design Centre in London, one line from a panel stayed with me. Isaac Arevalo, Director of Supply Chain at AG1, was describing what his team actually does all day. He said they joke internally that "our job is mainly relationship management and firefighting", sitting with carriers and 3PLs to understand the mapping and the data.

Why airline retail struggles, and what the shop never asks

Ahmed El-Alfy — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 13:46:03 GMT

I think airlines get far less credit as retailers than they deserve.

Parcel Network Fragmentation and the AI Business Case

Ahmed El-Alfy — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 07:00:00 GMT

Your customers are splitting your network into more carriers and more nodes. Your cost and tracking systems cannot see that shape. That is why the return on AI will not add up.

Postal or commercial carrier for a parcel lane, GN TEQ

Ahmed El-Alfy — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 08:00:00 GMT

A forwarder chooses a cross-border parcel channel lane by lane rather than company-wide, on product, price and proven performance. The postal channel is now a priced, measured product rather than a treaty rate, a commercial carrier sells you a delivery promise and owns it, and your own destination partner costs the least per parcel and the most to run.

Win parcel volume from your existing freight book, GN TEQ

Ahmed El-Alfy — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 10:24:11 GMT

A freight forwarder wins cross-border parcel volume from customers it already serves by finding the accounts that already move e-commerce goods as freight, then re-quoting one lane per parcel instead of per kilo. The delivery promise and the tracking have to come with it, or your quote cannot be compared with the one the retailer is buying today.

The post office as fulfilment infrastructure, not a doorway

Ahmed El-Alfy — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 15:36:16 GMT

Somewhere in your network this morning, a customer walked into a branch, handed over a prepaid parcel and left. A minute at the counter, maybe less. A few pence of margin, on a parcel somebody else had already priced and already sold.

How a parcel operation works when you're a forwarder

Ahmed El-Alfy — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 15:20:38 GMT

The six-step flow, and why most of it is your existing Tuesday

In a parcel hub, every unit has a cut-off time. Miss it and the parcel loses a full day, and the customer gets an email about it. Nothing in forwarding runs to a clock that unforgiving, and the rest of the operation is more familiar than that fact makes it sound.

You already own the hardest part of parcel

Ahmed El-Alfy — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 10:07:40 GMT

The asset audit: what transfers from forwarding to parcel, and the three gaps you buy

Every forwarder that looks seriously at parcel runs the same numbers first. Sortation capex. Last-mile fleet or subcontractor rates. A tracking platform that can survive peak. Then the total comes back and the project gets parked until next year.

What retailers actually want from their delivery partners

Ahmed El-Alfy — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 11:47:58 GMT

At Deliver Europein early June, GN TEQ hosted a roundtable that brought together supply chain leaders from across travel retail, FMCG, home furnishings, apparel and sporting goods. The brief was simple: put the slides away and say what's really going on. What came out of the hour wasn't a wish list for faster vans or cheaper rates. It was something more useful, and more honest.

Here's what the people running these operations told us.

Speed and price stopped being the argument

Every person around the table agreed on one thing early. Speed and cost are now the price of entry, not the reason anyone wins or keeps the work. What separates a good partner from a forgettable one is whether they stay on the journey when things get hard.

One travel retail operator, a fourth-generation family business, put it plainly. "If you squeeze everyone on cost and spend all your time bashing them, then comes the next Covid, or whatever happens next, you won't be the first they pick up the phone for."

That last line carries more weight than it first appears. When capacity tightens, during peak, or a port backs up, or a network buckles, carriers don't share the pain evenly. They protect the customers they value. If you've spent three years driving a partner to the floor on price, you're at the back of that queue. The cost shows up as scrambling for backup carriers at spot rates, splitting volume across networks you don't know, and in the worst case missing the peak window you built the whole quarter around. The saving you booked in March is gone by November.

A procurement consultant on the supplier side made the same point from the other direction: the hardest part of finding a partner now is building the relationship, because there's less trust between companies than there used to be. Buyer and supplier, opposite sides of the table, landed in the same place.