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TWST: Can we begin with a brief historical sketch to Business Post (London: BPG.L) and an overview of where the company is positioned today?

Mr. Fitzwilliam: We started life 30 years ago as a London-based courier company and in the 1980s grew very rapidly as an express parcel delivery company off the growing trend for “just-in-time” solutions. We floated on the London Stock Exchange in July 1993, having become a national company shortly before. Today we are a broadly-based express delivery company offering a range of parcel and mail services, and very much operating at the premium end of the market. By that I mean that we compete on reliability of delivery performance rather than price. We compete with a number of both postal monopoly-owned companies and other private sector UK companies.

TWST: You mentioned that you are at the premium end, the high end of the express delivery market. How would you define the customer base then?

Mr. Fitzwilliam: Our customers tend to be those who are looking for reliability of service, coupled with leading-edge information systems. This contrasts with some of our competitors who are in the high volume / low value end of the market. Our customer base ranges across all markets sectors, but in particular we tend to be quite attractive to the high-tech sector. With their fragile, high value goods, customers like both the reliability of our service and also the way in which we move parcels through our network. We operate a cage-based system whereby a parcel is put into a cage at the collection point and kept in that cage while it is being moved across the country, only coming out of the cage for delivery at its ultimate destination. This means that a parcel doesn’t get thrown onto the back of a vehicle nor does it get thrown around in an automatic conveyer or sortation system. As a result of this system, we have a very good record for security and not damaging our packages. That combination makes us very attractive to the high tech sector.

TWST: Can we take a quick glance forward to the coming 12 or 24 months? What’s the strategic direction and what milestones are you looking to accomplish?

Mr. Fitzwilliam: Following the appointment of Paul Carvell as Chief Executive in early 2001, the senior management team put together a three year plan, which we have started implementing in this financial year, from April 2002. The strategy revolves around maintaining and nurturing our market position in the overnight business-to-business express delivery sector, whilst growing some complementary areas in which we currently have much smaller market shares. Examples include the same-day courier market, home deliveries and cross-border movements. In each case we have brought in an expert from the relevant sector to grow our market share. On top of that, we also have a big opportunity in the deregulation of the UK postal market. From January 2003 the postal market is being progressively opened up to competition. Starting with customers who send large quantities of mail each day, companies like Business Post will be able to compete with the Royal Mail for delivering letters. We see this as a natural extension of our core parcel business. After all, a letter is just a very small parcel. So in the UK we would very much like to enter the mail delivery market by adopting an approach similar to the “workshare” model in the US. We will collect mail and perform initial sortation and overnight linehaul movements and ask the Royal Mail to perform the final sort and “last mile” delivery. We have so far secured a licence to deliver mail from the industry regulator, and at the moment we are in the process of trying to agree a price with the Royal Mail for them to deliver that last mile for us. This represents a fabulous opportunity for us because the UK postal market is worth over £5 billion a year, which currently is the monopoly of the Royal Mail. If we were only to get a 3% share of the mail market we would double Business Post’s turnover.