thank you for watching this last M profits video Donald Trump has been moted to have plans to sell the USPS is this feasible watch on to find out more last M profits is brought to by parcel pending by quadin Gary recently I posted something on LinkedIn about Mr Trump's or future president Trump's latest idea which apparently is to consider selling off the USBs have you heard about that I did I saw actually your it was your um post that alerted me to it it does remind me right back at the beginning of the raw M privatization in 2016 which followed the separation of raw male and post office now fed um sorry USBS is still one huge enormous business all the logistics and home delivery and an enormous retail chain as well so I'm wondering if this is a combo deal or whether it's a similar idea to to break it up a little bit you know get rid of the delivery arm and make the retail part separate I'm not sure what what would happen yeah the the thing because in theory it's all great you privatize the taxpayer no longer has the problem but the the flip side is that the taxpayer who's also Joe public who use the post office uh will then be uh subject to whatever service issues or cost issues that arise you know my take on it is that in principle great idea but you first have to clean it up a little bit because if you leave all the issues within the business and you just privatize it all you're doing is you're moving a problem child from the state to a private owner who probably won't manage and then if you're lucky you'll get a white knight like Daniel kinsky in the case of Royal Male but if you're unlucky then it goes back to the taxpayer with an even bigger problem well I think I think the Big Challenge here is that you know raw m is he's not a broken business you know it without the post office burden if you like the you know the government subsidy that runs the post office it doesn't lose it relatively a huge amount of money USPS on the other hand lost $9.5 billion in 2024 so I think you've got to drag that number close to zero at the very least before you could think about somebody taking it on otherwise the US government has got the issue of how much money are you going to pay somebody to take the problem child away You're Going To Burn 800 million a month while you're trying to get it into into order and you've got a huge business you know highly bureaucratic very topheavy very expensive Workforce very very strong union huge amount of challenges you know and two massive private competitors in the the parcel space which are UPS and FedEx as we've talked about in other videos got their own issues to try to get to back to profitability a country that does something like 60% of its e-commerce through Amazon and Amazon Logistics you know stealing volume from everybody I think it's a tough order for somebody to take it on I don't know how deep Daniel's pockets are but I don't think they're that deep yeah and I I think this is this is really The $64,000 Question can they bring it to the point at which it's not losing and frankly if they find the management that can do that then why bother privatizing it because it will be working on the other hand take the approach and and you say right post offices themselves are the cash drain and and we keep that in government ownership to make sure services are protected and as we've said before you know people that are dependent on their local post office a lot of the time you know we keep all of that keep all of that in play and then you just get rid of the delivery business um if you could cleave them in two maybe there's a bit of value in the delivery business that could be separated off yeah I think it's it's certainly far more complex and you know we said the amounts are bigger but then America the sorry America the US is so much bigger you know my feeling is there's no easy win perhaps by separating and by the way we'll have another video on separation because FedEx have announced a separation or a plan to separate their Freight Business from The Core Business we can talk about that later but I guess Gary the the advantage of the separation will be that it means you have in theory two more manageable businesses because they're more focused they they cover less and as you mentioned a lot of the issues are in the big infrastructure if it's like the UK but my feeling though is if future president Trump wants to deal with this he's going to have to have some damn good people inside frankly whatever decision is taken whether it's to keep things as they are whether it's to split or whether it's to sell none of that will work without strong management and I'm not so sure that that's been the case not just by the way with USPS I you know I always say that that we have the Legacy carriers in the US it's a market whereby I would say there's not much they can be taught quite the opposite in terms of fulfillment certainly if you go to see an Amazon fulfillment center but on the last mile although Amazon's done an awful lot of learning I'm not so convinced that the Market's gone that way no but they still have quite a lot of letters and I don't think the letter volume has has dropped to the the very low percentage you see some of the European markets um Americans still pay their bills with these little bits of paper called checks I mean I literally can't remember the last time I wrote a check my wife won a little prize in a charity raffle and they sent her a check for 20 and it was like receiving you know something from like Raiders of the Lost Arc some sort of antique document what do we do with this now you know there a little bit of that so the US has still got you know a decent amount of male volume about I've met um postmaster to Joy on on a couple of occasions and you know he's ambitious guy you know he's he's um in his early 70s now but he's still got big plans for the organization and he's trying to lead a big turnaround but it just shows you the scale of the task that he's been imposed for a long time and not managed to do it yet so I think probably you know the question comes back to the fact whichever option is taken it's going to need a strong team to make it happen and can president Trump find that team uh and then probably to be honest if he finds the team that can do it then he can pick and choose between the options because all will theoretically be possible although I'm with you on the fact that it's a huge organization and I don't imagine whatever happens that this is going to take place over the next year to because this is a big machine yeah I thought for a horrible moment there Merrick you were pitching to take it on yourself but I think that's probably not the brightest way to spend the Twilight of our careers trying to turn around a super tanker that's only running on one engine I think as I think it was Clint Eastwood that said in one of the Dirty Harry films every man must know his limitations and um I'm with Clint on this one Gary especially especially if they've got as many as you have Merck is probably all right I won't I'm not even going to jump to the bait there Gary really great talk and if you've enjoyed the uh this is to the viewers of course if you've enjoyed this video please below press like And subscribe because that's what helps keep these videos free for you Gary great talking look forward to the next one last mile profits is brought to you by parcel pending by quadin