The first postal parcel center was opened in Hagen 30 years ago. A lot has changed since then. The former US competitor DHL was taken over. Today, orders are no longer placed via teleshopping and catalogs, but online.
The volume of parcels sent by Deutsche Post has more than doubled in the three decades since the opening of its first parcel center. While in 1994 there were 2.5 million parcels per working day, this figure has now risen to 6.3 million, the postal group DHL, which trades on the stock exchange as Deutsche Post AG, announced in Bonn.
On May 26, 1994, the company opened its first parcel center in Hagen in North Rhine-Westphalia and by mid-1995 had opened 32 additional locations nationwide, including in Regensburg (Bavaria), Lahr (Baden-Württemberg), Neuwied (Rhineland-Palatinate), Dorsten (North Rhine-Westphalia), Neustrelitz (Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania) and Rüdersdorf near Berlin.
Handled at up to seven locations
The processes were simplified and accelerated over time: if a parcel had previously been dropped off, it was handled at up to seven post offices before it reached the recipient. The relatively small parcel offices were not far from train stations. Thanks to the new freight network, a parcel was only handled twice, the transport vehicles were better utilized and the number of trips was reduced.
DHL now has 38 parcel centers nationwide, most of which are located outside of larger cities and are well connected to motorways or federal highways. In terms of transport, they are therefore much better connected than the parcel offices of the past, whose successors they became.
Parcel division “restructuring case” 30 years ago
According to the postal service, the freight sector, as the parcel division was called at the time, was “a restructuring case” three decades ago, which the yellow giant brought back into shape with a major investment of four billion D-Marks (a good two billion euros).
The demand for packages was very different back then than it is today: catalog orders were widespread and teleshopping was on the rise – that is, product advertising on television where German citizens could order by phone.
Boom in online commerce
According to company information, the market share of Deutsche Post, which was created from the Federal Post Office at the beginning of 1994, in the domestic parcel market was only 26 percent in 1994; today it is more than 40 percent.
After the turn of the millennium, the boom in online commerce gradually began, making parcels a natural part of everyday life for many German citizens in the Internet age – demand increased and the post office gradually gained ground in the parcel market.
Recently, the logistics giant’s parcel volume has again grown strongly, by 4.4 percent to 424 million in the first quarter of the year. In the Post & Parcel Germany division, in which DHL has bundled its letter and parcel services and delivers the shipments together in some places in what is known as a combined delivery service, sales increased by 1.6 percent to 4.3 billion euros.
US competitor DHL acquired in 2002
A look at old magazines reveals a less than flattering picture for the Bonn-based company: In a parcel ranking by the business magazine Impulse in 1994, the post office was ranked among the lowest, ahead of a competitor called DHL: the US company was still a competitor of the Bonn-based company at the time, and in 2002 it was taken over by Deutsche Post.
Since 2023, the globally active logistics company has been called DHL; the Bonn-based company only operates as Deutsche Post on the stock exchange and in the national mail business. The company has 594,000 employees worldwide, 187,000 of whom work in the national mail and parcel sector.