DHL 2004 Annual Report Download - page 30

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services in the UK, the Netherlands, France and Spain. We have also entered the USA – the
world’s largest mail market: by acquiring SmartMail and QuikPak, we have not only
become the largest private mail service provider in America, we are also cooperating with
the United States Postal Service (USPS) over the last mile of delivery. You can find further
details on our acquisitions in the Group Management Report starting on page 63. In
addition, we have further expanded our business platform due to cooperations: we now
cover key parts of the Asian and Latin American markets with Yamato, a leading trans-
port service provider in Japan, and the Mexican postal service SePoMex. Business outside
Germany is becoming extremely important to us given the increasing liberalization of
mail markets.
In October 2004, we began bundling our international mail services outside Germany
under a new umbrella brand: DHL Global Mail now stands for our global, cross-divisional
one-stop shopping concept. The Group’s brand architecture is presented in the section
entitled “Strategy” on page 20.
Focus on quality
Our mail services are based on sophisticated technology and seamless processes. This is
reflected in the impressive 89% automation achieved by our mail centers. As part of the
STAR program, we again significantly improved efficiency in our downstream produc-
tion areas in 2004, as you can read on the next page.
Our customers use four criteria to measure the quality of our mail services:
correct processing,
short transit times,
no losses and
no damage to items.
When surveyed, they unanimously agreed that the transit time of letters was the most
im portant quality criterion. This again amounted to an extremely good average of 95%
in Germany for 2004. This means that, for every 100 letters handed to us during our daily
opening hours or before the last collection, 95 were delivered to their recipients the next
day, or the average transit time for a letter in Germany was 1.06 days. We are also exporting
our high quality standards to other European countries: with a rate of 96%, we again
sub stantially exceeded the requirement laid down by the European Union (EU) for im por t-
ing letters. This stipulates that at least 85% of letters within the EU be delivered to their
recipients in the destination country three days after being handed over in the country of
origin.
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