Royal Mail slashes its dividend amid threat of renationalisation
As online deliveries proliferate, it plans to introduce post boxes for parcels around the UK and looks to expand overseas
Bengaluru — Britain’s Royal Mail slashed its dividend by 40% on Wednesday to fund a new five-year turnaround drive that seeks to better position the group for a future dominated by online parcel deliveries and help to expand further overseas. Facing the threat of re-nationalisation from the opposition Labour Party, the former British monopoly has promised to invest a further £1.8bn in its UK postal service in the hope of turning it around. The company will introduce about 1,400 parcel post boxes across the UK, in what it said was the single biggest repurposing of the post box network in more than 160 years. CEO Rico Back told Reuters it would seek to earn 40% of revenue from its operations outside Britain and 70% from parcel deliveries by the end of the five-year period. To fund that drive, the company said it would cut its dividend for 2019/2020 to 15p a share from 25p in 2018/2019. “This is not a decision we have taken lightly as we know how important the dividend is to our shareh...
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