Pitney Bowes sees opportunity in e-commerce and is poised for “The next 100 years”

Pitney Bowes is gradually shifting its focus from mailing business to shipping space. With its SendPro series of solutions, the company has simplified its shipping process across geographies, while doing away with major roadblocks in the shipping and mailing workflow. For Pitney Bowes, apart from its traditional customers, ecommerce marketplace and small online seller vertical is growing multi-fold. In a chat with VARINDIA, Venkat Rao, Country Director, Pitney Bowes, India & South Asia discusses about the company’s trending products and solution, trends, success mantra and growth verticals -     

What has been your top trending (market pull) products/solutions/services of your company this year?

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 to the shipping space. Today, 50% of the company’s revenues come from the traditional mailing business, while the other 50% comes from shipping, which is a growth market.

From sending important documents from the office to freight shipping from the warehouse, Pitney Bowes hassimplified the shipping process across geographies with its SendPro series of solutions. Every single pain point or a bottleneck in the shipping and mailing workflow is addressed with its solutions. A shipper or a 3PL (third party logistics) may not realize there is a problem but Pitney Bowes is already prepared with a solution. 

In April, Pitney Bowes partnered with Shyplite, a logistics technology company and a SaaS based multicarrier shipping platform for online sellers, retailers, small-medium and corporate businesses that simplifies shipping. The partnership will facilitate simple single pricing without any hassle of calculating carrierwide costs as well as automated tracking shipments at one place without visiting different carriers’ websites. Pitney Bowes is also bringing newer technologies in dynamic and static weighing solutions to the market. Since the launch of Pitney Bowes + Shyplite solution, the parcel volumes have doubled and the growth is coming from the ecommerce marketplace and small online seller community. By the end of the year 2019, the stats will triple with the upcoming festive season.
With exponential growth in ecommerce, the company is exploring opportunities in South Asian countries for its solutions. Pitney Bowes India will leverage its experience and knowledge with India Post and share the same with local postal departments, logistics and e-commerce companies in South Asian countries.

What are the mega key trends that define the industry that you are a part of at present?

The shipping industry in India is experiencing an exponential growth with the e-retail industry providing a major lift. Some of these trends are - 
•    India’s ecommerce market will touch $150 billion and create over a million jobs by 2022, growing at an annual rate of 51 %, the highest in the world.
•    E-tail and e-travel are the dominant segments within the e-commerce marketplace model.
•    The e-tail market is expected to exceed $60 billion by 2022, thus, growing at a CAGR of 30% each year.

The growth drivers include -

The ongoing digital transformation in the country is expected to increase India’s total internet user base to 829 million by 2021 from 604.21 million as of December 2018. India’s internet economy is expected to double from US$125 billion as of April 2017 to US$ 250 billion by 2020, majorly backed by ecommerce. 
The e-commerce industry is directly impacting the micro, small & medium enterprises (MSME) in India by providing means of financing, technology and training and has a favourable cascading effect on other industries as well. The Indian e-commerce industry has been on an upward growth trajectory and is expected to surpass the US to become the second largest e-commerce market in the world by 2034. Technology enabled innovations like digital payments, hyper-local logistics, analytics driven customer engagement and digital advertisements will likely support the growth in the sector. The growth in e-commerce sector will also boost employment, increase revenues from export, increase tax collection by ex-chequers, and provide better products and services to customers in the long-term.

•    Multi-carrier Software to see the highest growth and it presents an overall opportunity of $20 million in 2019 alone.
•    Label printers to grow at a CAGR of 21% (during 2017-2020) and represent an overall market opportunity of $7 million.
•    Dynamic weighing solution to grow at a CAGR of 16% to become an overall market of $9 million.

(Source – ibefhttps://www.ibef.org/industry/ecommerce.aspx)

Please share the success mantra of your organization and your major achievements in the year 2018-19.

Pitney Bowes has been actively involved in the shifting trends of shipping. At Pitney Bowes, people believe in delivering innovations that help clients navigate the complex and is always evolving in the world of commerce from helping them use data to market to the best customers, to efficiently enabling the sending of parcels and packages, to securing payments through statements and invoices. Clients around the world, including 90% of the Fortune 500 rely on the accuracy and precision delivered by Pitney Bowes solutions, analytics, and APIs in theareas of ecommerce fulfilment, shipping and returns; cross-border ecommerce; presort services; office mailing and shipping.

Pitney Bowes is poised for “The next 100 years”. The fast-paced industry could look dramatically different in even just a few years. Creating digital solutions and focusing on customers will prepare e-commerce companies to deliver amazing, data-driven experiences, no matter what the future brings.

Have you signed any new customer this year? Which vertical is growing for you at present?

Pitney Bowes is positioning its shipping solutions to segments like e-commerce marketplace and small online retailers, traditional brick & mortar retail players, corporates, Couriers, Regional Logistic Players and India Post. For its mailing solutions, traditional customers (80% Government and BFSI) continue to upgrade to advanced franking solutions. Since the launch, Pitney Bowes + Shyplite has added 500+ new customers who are sending packages using its platform. As a growth strategy, it continues to build its shipping portfolio to address different pain points of its customer and prospect base.