bpost NV (BPOST) reported its first-quarter earnings for 2025, showing a significant increase in group operating income and a positive market reaction. The company’s stock rose by 7.04% following the earnings release, driven by its robust performance despite challenges in the North American market and declining domestic mail volumes. With a market capitalization of $328 million and trailing twelve-month revenue of $4.48 billion, the company maintained its EBIT guidance for the full year, signaling confidence in its strategic initiatives. According to InvestingPro analysis, bpost currently trades at an attractive Price/Book ratio of 0.32x and offers a substantial dividend yield of 6.67%.
Key Takeaways
- bpost NV’s Q1 2025 group operating income increased by 13% year-over-year.
- The stock price surged by 7.04% post-earnings announcement.
- The company faced headwinds from North American contract terminations and domestic mail volume declines.
- EBIT guidance for the full year remains at €150-180 million.
Company Performance
bpost NV demonstrated resilience in Q1 2025 with a 13% year-over-year increase in group operating income, reaching €1.19 billion. Despite facing challenges such as contract terminations in North America and an 8% decline in domestic mail volumes, the company managed to sustain its growth momentum. Based on InvestingPro data, which includes 8+ additional exclusive insights, the company’s EBITDA stands at $345 million, reflecting its operational efficiency. The company’s diversified service offerings and robust customer clearance capabilities have positioned it well amidst sluggish parcel market growth and macroeconomic uncertainties.
Financial Highlights
- Group Operating Income: €1.19 billion (+13% YoY)
- Adjusted EBIT: €41.6 million (3.7% margin)
Market Reaction
Following the earnings release, bpost NV’s stock price increased by 7.04%, closing at €1.46. This surge reflects a positive investor sentiment, likely driven by the company’s robust financial performance and reaffirmed EBIT guidance. While the stock has experienced a significant decline of 59% over the past year, InvestingPro analysis suggests the company is currently trading near its Fair Value. For deeper insights into bpost’s valuation and future prospects, investors can access the comprehensive Pro Research Report, part of InvestingPro’s coverage of 1,400+ top stocks.
Outlook & Guidance
bpost NV maintained its EBIT guidance for 2025 at €150-180 million. The company expects parcel volume growth at the low end of the mid-single-digit range. With a Capital Markets Day scheduled for June 3, 2025, bpost aims to provide further insights into its strategic direction and growth initiatives.
Executive Commentary
CEO Chris Peters expressed confidence in the company’s trajectory, stating, "We continue to track towards the full year EBIT guidance." CFO Philippe Dortien highlighted market challenges, noting, "The market growth is sluggish. The customer confidence is again in bad territories." Peters also emphasized the company’s strategic strengths, saying, "We have a portfolio with multiple strengths and we can capitalize on that to provide alternative trade lanes."
Risks and Challenges
- North American contract terminations pose a risk to revenue growth.
- Structural decline in domestic mail volumes could impact future earnings.
- Macroeconomic uncertainties, including potential tariffs, may affect trade lanes and consumer confidence.
- Sluggish parcel market growth could limit expansion opportunities.
- Potential strikes could disrupt operations and affect business continuity.
Q&A
During the earnings call, analysts inquired about the potential impacts of strikes on volumes and the strategies for onboarding new clients in the Radial U.S. segment. Discussions also covered the implications of potential tariffs and trade wars, highlighting the company’s proactive measures to mitigate these risks.
Full transcript - bpost NV (BPOST) Q1 2025:
Conference Operator: Hello, welcome to the Bipost Group First Quarter twenty twenty five Analyst Conference Call. On today’s call, we have Mr. Philippe Dortien, CFO and Mr. Chris Peters, CEO. Please note this call is being recorded.
And for the duration of the call, your line will be on listen only. You will have the opportunity to ask questions at the end of the call. I will now hand over to your host, Mr. Chris Peters, CEO, to begin today’s conference. Please go ahead, sir.
Chris Peters, CEO, Bipost Group: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to all of you, and thank you for joining us. We don’t only have Philippe and myself, but also Antoine Lebach, Head of Investor Relations in the room, and Philippe and myself will walk you through our first quarter twenty twenty five results. We posted the materials on our website this morning. We will walk you through the presentation and we’ll then take your questions.
As always, two questions each would ensure everyone gets the chance to be addressed in the upcoming hour. Philippe, over to you for the financials. I’ll then come back with an update on some of our key strategic priorities for 2025.
Philippe Dortien, CFO, Bipost Group: Thank you, Chris, and good morning to all. As you can see on the highlights on Page three, our group operating income for Q1 stood at EUR $1,190,000,000, an increase year over year by close to 13%. At constant perimeter, meaning excluding the EUR 199,000,000 consolidation impact of SASE, our operating income decreased by 7% or EUR 73,000,000, mainly driven by the following factors: number one, persistent headwinds in North America following contract termination announced in 2024 and the loss of enterprise customer earlier this year as flagged in our 2025 outlook. Second, lower price revenue driven by the new price contract that came into effect in July of last year in 2024, combined with continued structural volume decline in domestic mail. And
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Philippe Dortien, CFO, Bipost Group: have Adjusted EBIT came in at 41,600,000 with a margin of 3.7% or €28,400,000 when excluding the 13,100,000.0 contribution of Stasi. On a like for like basis, this reflects a year on year decline of minus €41,300,000 Beyond the €6,000,000 impact from the strike, this decline is primarily driven by price, with lower revenue have significant impact on EBIT and North America where ongoing productivity gains are not sufficient to fully offset top line pressures. We’ll come back in the section of 3PL, but we already want to emphasize that Stasi performance is fully in line again on the first quarter with our expectation and our guidance 2025 that we shared in February with you. In the first quarter, its IFRS EBIT contribution was negatively affected by 5,100,000 front loaded IFRIC 21 booking whereas on the local accounting standard, this annual impact is spread evenly over the twelve months of the year.
Since the impact is fully booked in the first quarter, the margin over the next three quarters will compensate for it and on a full year basis this effect will be fully neutralized. More broadly, at B plus level, the results we are presenting today are in line with our expectations and Chris will come back on that one. Before diving into the financial performance of our business unit, you will note on slide four that our financial result decreased by EUR28 million, mainly due to four factors: higher interest expense resulting from the EUR1 million increase in debt following the acquisition of SASE in 2024 lower interest income driven by lower money market rates and lower cash balance following the acquisition of CASI, higher lease related interest expense and some non cash FX impact. Let’s move now to the details of the three segments. I’m on page five with last mile segment.
We see that revenue declined by CHF34 million to CHF545 million. In line with Q3 and Q4 last year, domestic mail recorded around CHF28 million decline in revenue, of which EUR19 million comes from the press alone, mainly due to the new contract with the editors following the end of the press concession in June 2024. Excluding press, mail recorded an underlying volume decline of 8% for the quarter. This decline in mail volume led to a revenue impact of €19,100,000 though was partially offset by a positive price and mix impact of plus 3.9% or €9,700,000 As a result, the domestic mail revenue decline was limited to minus 4% or €10,000,000 year over year. Our parcels revenue remained stable year over year reflecting a volume decline of 2.1% and a positive price mix effect of 2.2%.
Let’s dig into it in the different subcomponents. On the volume side, the decline was driven by volume loss and shifted to the competition during the two week strike of the month of February that affected our national sorting and sales was by volume
was
January and March. As for the pricemix, it stood at 2.2%. This was also negatively impacted by the strike as we faced customer claims and contractor penalties related to the non quality and service disruptions. Excluding the strike, the average price mix was closer to 3.9% like we saw it in January and in March. Revenue from other activities including retail, value added services and personal logistics declined by €5,000,000 year over year, mainly due to lower banking revenue and re pricing of sales services, while Dyna Group remained nearly stable.
Let’s move to the P and L on page six. Our total operating income decreased by more than million or 5.5%. On the cost side, our OpEx including depreciation and amortization only slightly declined by 0.5% or €2,500,000 This reflects higher salary cost per FTE with a 2.7% year over year increase driven by salary indexation in June 2024 and in March 2025. However, this was offset by unpaid absence as well as lower FTE and increase during the strike period and lower cost of sales. Beyond the drop in price revenue, the 31,000,000 year on year decline in adjusted EBIT also includes approximately 6,000,000 of direct strike impact.
This mainly reflects commercial losses in partial volume, but also in mainly the contractual penalties and to a lesser extent payroll costs as just mentioned. Let’s move to the segment 3PL on page seven. 3PL revenue increased by €165,000,000 overall, but declined by €32,000,000 or minus 12% while excluding the €197,000,000 contribution from Stasi consolidation in the quarter. Stasi revenues reached €197,000,000 up 2.4 year on year, fully in line with the seasonality anticipated in our full year outlook. In 3PL Europe, at constant perimeter, radial and accident sales were up 12% year over year, continuing the trend of previous quarters.
This growth was fueled by customer onboarding as part as our international expansion efforts and upselling activities targeting existing customers. In 3PL North America, revenue decreased by €37,000,000 A constant exchange rate this corresponds to a decrease of 19% resulting from revenue churn from contract termination announced in 2024 and early twenty twenty five, lower sales from existing customers which offset the contribution from new customer launches in 2025. Let’s move to the P and L of 3PL on slide eight. Excluding SASE, while the total operating income decreased by 12%, our operating expense and D and E decreased by 9%, primarily driven by lower variable OpEx in line with Radial’s revenue trend and a sustained improvement in Radial U. S.
Variable contribution margin. Our VCM has increased by around 3% year over year and is currently at its highest level ever. At constant perimeter, our adjusted EBIT is down EUR 7,000,000 mainly relating to real estate footprint. Regarding SASE, the EBIT contribution came at €13,100,000 with a margin of 6.6%. This is in line with the quarterly seasonality leading to our full year guidance of 10% to 12%.
Operationally and in local GAAP, the performance is according to plan. In IFRS though, this softer and EBIT margin in Q1 reflect the annual front loaded IFRS 21 impact of EUR 5,100,000.0. When adjusting the EUR 3,800,000.0 million of this impact attributable to the period April to December, the EBIT margin is slightly below 9%. Moving on to cross border on page nine. Cross border
to ongoing expansion in Europe, this was not sufficient to offset the adverse market conditions in The UK market. As in the previous quarters, our top line in North America remains under pressure. Cross border border North America revenue declined by CHF4 million or 6% as Landmark Global continued to face volume headwinds while the broader tariff environment is delaying new business opportunities. Overall, our global cross border operating income decreased by CHF 8,000,000 or 5% year over year. As shown on page 10, our OpEx and G and A decreased at the same time by 4.7%, driven by lower volume transportation costs, reflecting lower North American and UK volume alongside with improved transport rates.
Overall, despite top line decline, our margin remains broadly intact. From an EBIT perspective, the CHF2 million decrease reflects ongoing pressure at landmark in The U. S. On to Corporate segment on page 11. Adjusted EBIT declined by EUR 2,000,000 to minus EUR 12,000,000, mainly driven by higher net OpEx after internal invoicing invoicing and G and A.
These were largely the result of higher FTEs and inflationary pressure following the two salaries indexation I have mentioned earlier. Let’s move to the cash flow statement on slide 12. The main items to flag here are the following: cash flow from operating activities before change in working capital stood at CHF131 million and decreased by CHF25 million versus last year, mainly reflecting higher corporate tax repayment last year. Change in working capital amounted to plus CHF45 million. The minus CHF71 million euros variance is primarily due to the termination of the price concession in June.
As a reminder, the compensation under that previous price concession was typically prepaid in advance while price revenues are now invoiced according to normal billing cycles under the new price contract with the enablers. The net cash outflow from investing activities totaled million driven by our CapEx for international e commerce logistics, parcels brokers and capacity expansion and our million, mainly reflecting higher lease liability related payments, result of the scope effect of the acquisition of Stasi in August. Chris is bringing us now to the outlook for 2025 and the strategic priorities.
Chris Peters, CEO, Bipost Group: Thank you, Philippe. As you know, we presented our guidance at the February, just two months ago. The results Philippe just shared are broadly in line with our expectation at group level and continue to track towards the full year EBIT guidance. This is despite the direct strike impacts incurred in Q1, which at the time of our initial guidance could not yet be quantified and were therefore excluded at that moment. While several market developments have occurred since then, the current trajectory supports maintaining our EBIT guidance of EUR
Analyst: 150,000,000
Chris Peters, CEO, Bipost Group: to EUR 180,000,000 with recent trends indicating reduced risk of landing at the lower end of this range. That said, we remain cautious and continued vigilance is required. This guidance does not factor in any potential future commercial impacts coming from the February strike, neither the potential impacts of evolving trades, tariffs and policies driving macroeconomic uncertainty and limiting visibility. This being said, we of course have already a visibility of the risks coming from the trade wars and also the opportunities that we see. First of all, at the risk side, we see a reduced consumption, especially in Canada where you see the lower consumer confidence and also a growing national sentiment or an anti U.
S. Sentiment. Or better said, you see also the disruption of certain trade lanes where you see that due to the introduction of tariffs and duties that and the end of the minimus exemptions that trade flows are diminishing. And also you see that there is a delay in supply chain strategies as a consequence of the uncertainty, so decisions are delayed. On the other hand, for a company like Bikos Group, there is a number of opportunities also following out of this situation.
First of all, we have of course a portfolio with multiple strengths and we can capitalize on that to provide provide alternative trade lanes and also have robust customer clearance capabilities. We see that already that certain trade lanes in Canada have been redirected and that we can benefit from that. And also we are working on a diversified service offering. Certain clients are of course revisiting their potential supply chain strategies and we could be also a partner for them in those new strategies. If we then zoom in on the strategic initiatives.
In the previous discussion, we went through the 22 initiatives that we have. I’m not going to go through them each one by one. However, that being said, I think there is a lot of things moving and good news on most of those ones. If we first zoom in on the 3PL business, the new organization structure in Europe is in place. That means that Stasi Active and the Radial Europe are managed as ones.
And so there’s a lot of synergies coming out of that both at the commercial upside, so revenue upside as at the side of the cost synergies that we have. We also have this morning announced a leadership change. Thomas Mortier has announced that he will end his full time commitment by the end of this year and then continue as a consultant towards the company. He will remain invested in the company. But that also that transition helps us to prepare for the future and we will stepwise make sure that we prepare for that future.
At U. S. Side, good news on Fastrack. Fastrack is accelerating faster than Fastrack would even announce, meaning that we already onboarded five new clients on that with really very good metrics. So we have a number of cases where there are only a few weeks between signing of the contract and delivering to the first consumer with our fulfillment service.
And also you see that this is accelerating the portfolio diversification strategy that we have developed for U. S. If we then zoom in on Belgium or really last mile, as of May 1, I took the helm of the Belgian organization to help accelerate the transformation. We have a large number of new products that we launched quite successfully, about obituaries, secure delivery, label free and factory delivery pilot in the C2C segment. Our locker strategy is in full acceleration.
These days, we install six lockers a day in Belgium. And also at the level of the social dialogue, you see that the intensity of conversations is increasing, but the level of action except for the ones against the government is strongly reducing, which helps us of course to drive the hardly needed transformation of the organization in Belgium. Next to that, I still have to mention to you that we announced February that we will have a Capital Markets Day on June 3 to present in more detail our strategy and financial strategy for the coming years. The event will take place in Brussels and will also be accessible online. The same date and pre registration link have already been shared.
You can find all relevant information in the dedicated section of our investor website. Further details and final agenda will be communicated shortly. And now we are ready to take your questions. Again, two questions each please so that everyone gets a chance to be addressed during the session. Operator, please open the lines.
Conference Operator: Thank you very much. The first question comes from the line of Frank Clysson calling from Degroof, Petticum. Go ahead.
: Yes, good morning. My two questions. First of all, on Radial, that’s minus 19% in Q1, quite steep decline. Can you elaborate what you are doing on the cost side there to, let’s say, mitigate the negative revenue impact? And then secondly, on Parcel volumes in Benelux in Benelux.
Let’s say, without the strike months of February, it was 2.5% growth in January and March. If I’m not mistaken, your full year guidance is mid- to high single digit volume growth. So yes, is that still applicable? And what could drive the assumed growth acceleration in the rest of the year in Parcels? Okay.
Chris Peters, CEO, Bipost Group: I can take first question and maybe you can take the second So on the radial side, indeed, we have announced at the February meeting the impairment as a consequence of the loss of an enterprise size client. We have immediately afterwards reduced our staff with 144 FTEs. That was an immediate cost reduction reaction that we had both on the operational side but also in the overhead side to adjust our cost structure to that reality. So the only element that was remaining was the leasing cost that we had into it, which of course is something that we cannot reduce in that very short term. But if you look at all the other costs, more or less we can follow the revenues of our clients quite quickly in The U.
S. Context.
Philippe Dortien, CFO, Bipost Group: On the Parcel side, you are absolutely right, Frank. We guided mid to high single digit for the full year. In Q1, we have been affected by the strike, which is a direct impact of the strike. But there is also an indirect impact of the strike. It’s now getting to the customers to tell them that they had to join bPost as a reliable operator what we are.
There are some concerns raised, rightly so by the way by customers saying, okay, but what guarantees me that in the future will not happen again. And all the question that we are addressing right now with all our customers is to develop a robust contingency plan in case of strike. And I think this will come in the coming months with help restoring Chris mentioned it, that there are some people’s trials and there is some anti government strikes that affect us both. We would be able to to better react. So this slows down a bit the commercial development.
Also in the context where the market is not growing as what we expected, and we see it in Belgium, but it’s also observed by some of our colleagues on different European markets. So the market growth is sluggish. The customer confidence is again in bad territories. So that’s the reason why we do not believe that we will be able to catch up what we had announced. And I think we’ll be at low end of the range rather than the high end of the range.
: Okay. That’s clear. Thank you.
Conference Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, we currently have no question coming through. The next question comes from the line of Stefano calling from ABN AMRO ODDO. Go ahead. Yes.
Analyst: Morning. Happy that my hand was raised. I forgot to do that. Two questions actually related to the strikes. One is the volumes that you lost.
How much of that is structural? And how much of that can you, let’s say, gain back going forward? And then as a follow-up question, again, on the strike. With respect to being prepared or better prepared, like you mentioned, in the case of future strikes, what
Conference Operator: know it would be difficult to quantify, but
Analyst: I cannot imagine a strike not having a negative effect on your volumes. Thank you. Okay.
Chris Peters, CEO, Bipost Group: Thank you for all questions. Philippe, you take the first one. I will take the second one
Philippe Dortien, CFO, Bipost Group: Yes. On strikes, there is really the short term impact and the potentially mid to long term impact. What we can see is that, especially for the big customers, they have payback. Time to regain their trust, but it’s only a fraction of the portfolio.
Chris Peters, CEO, Bipost Group: Yes. Okay. On the business continuity plans, in our discussion with several of the clients, we had the question about how would we react and how can we make our plans more resilient in case of a strike. There has been plans developed on multiple levels. First of all, of course, we have had with our social partners an ongoing dialogue on the way, how we can react on the way, how we avoid that local social conflicts leads to a full blockage of the company.
That we limit the impact of that and also that we keep for everything that has to do with strikes against the government that we keep a client first approach into that discussion, which I think that we made very good progress over the last couple of months with our social partners in the understanding that we, of course, respect the right for strike that they have, which is a legal right that they have. But it’s a way how they strike that can harm or less harm the company. And I think that we made good progress not yet there, but I think that we may make steps together with them. I think that that relationship is evolving towards a constructive dialogue that we need to have to work on that. Then of course, next to that, operational measures that we can take, I’m not going to give all the details of what we have in those plans, but each of those clients have a specific approach of what would happen in case that we would have a sorting center or a transport blockage, which are the two most
Conference Operator: slide.
Chris Peters, CEO, Bipost Group: And of comes alternative backups that we can have to ensure that we can
deliver on those clients, which is key for them, of course, in the way how they will distribute the volumes, as Philippe said before. And so there, we made important progress. We’re still also in discussion with those clients and most of them are, of course, the large volume companies in the first place where we’re working on. And I think that what they see that we’re doing now is giving them the confidence that we have increased our resilience and our reliability going forward.
Analyst: And if I may sneak in one last question, which is related to your APM proposition. If I remember correctly, the Q4 results, you mentioned that you had about 1,300, so 1,300 lockers with the intention to double the amount of lockers and triple the capacity. Is that still
Conference Operator: in place for this year?
Analyst: And by the way, how big are they? I don’t know if you can tell me, let’s say, the average rocker quantity or size of the APMs.
Chris Peters, CEO, Bipost Group: Yes. So we continue to put those lockers in place. I think that we have a very successful program focused on the areas of most client traction towards those lockers. You can do the math yourself. We need to be at six lockers installed a day, which is the speed at which we are as we speak.
So we had a start in the year at four, five per day and we ramped it up now to six per day that we installed, six per working day that we are installing. And we have have a pipeline of permits and approvals or agreements with partners that we can install them so that we don’t see any major hiccup coming in the coming months to install them all. We still have to work a little bit on technology for the ones that have no direct power connection. So that is one that we have delayed a little bit, but we have so many, let’s say, permits already that we can actually advance a couple of those ones that have a power connection. So that is a little bit a change that you see in that.
So we keep the pace of six per working day that we install. And I think that the good news there is that compared to the figures that we had initially on the speed that the utilization of those workers would be is much higher than what we expected. So in less than two months, we see that we reached the utilization rates that we actually expected to have actually over the course of eight to nine months. So we see that speeding up the use of those capabilities is much faster than we anticipated. And to your question on the size, I think that we’re on average size today depends a little bit because we know that we also focus on B2B going forward with larger doors.
But on average, we are around 100 doors per installation.
Analyst: Perfect. Thank you.
Conference Operator: The next question comes from the line of Mark Swatsoberg calling from ING. The
Analyst: first one is on Radial U. S. So Q1, obviously, already well flagged that it will be by double digit down. Now with the pipeline of onboarding of new clients and still a bit of little in the aftermath of the client churn and the large enterprise clients. What would you expect in the next quarters in terms of trend?
Would we see something like a low double digit decline in Q2 and then moving to mid single digit enterprise in Q4? Is that a bit the pattern? Can you give a bit more color maybe there? And then my yes, sorry, yes, let’s take the one on one, position.
Chris Peters, CEO, Bipost Group: Okay. So maybe on your question, I will ask Antoine to come back on the exact figures that we have in that forecast because I don’t have them with me. But what I can say is that on the fast track introduction, you know that on a trade fair in Las Vegas, what was it, early April, we introduced the new product and the launch of the product. And what we see today is actually that we, in conversion, are already at three quarter of our year’s target today. So the new approach is really a good success.
And we also see in the pipeline of clients asking for, depending on the states, clear proposal or detailed information on how they could work. That pipeline is well filled today. So that would mean that compared to the initial forecast that we have that we will be to some extent overbalanced in new onboarding of Fast Track clients more than we will see on enterprise clients in our initial budget. So we were before had a relationship of what was it fifty-fifty more or less than we expected. And I think that it will be an overbalance to fast track clients going forward.
When we will be fully compensated for the loss of the enterprise clients earlier this year, I think it’s more to the Q3 level that we will have if we look at Even later. Or Q4 that we will have that. So we onboarded and we are delivering on sizable clients also in Fastrack as we speak. So we have a couple of I think we onboarded five. Four of them are more in the €5,000,000 to 7,000,000 ACV range.
One is substantially above that. So this is one which is clearly a couple of tens of millions that we see in ACV that’s coming from that client. So if you look at that, of course, an enterprise client, you need to have like onboarded and delivered three times the volume that we have onboarded by now. Give us the time to make that happen. But overall, the trend is better than expected on the Fast Track side.
Enterprise level will remain more or less with the uncertainty that everybody knows in The U. S. Market where consumer confidence has gone down a little bit, so to be seen a little bit what happens at the enterprise side.
Philippe Dortien, CFO, Bipost Group: And if you allow me to add one element, even if it’s included in the word fast track, meaning that we could onboard fast. Typically, with the enterprise customers, we were not onboarding them or starting the operation after the summer. We were really stopping because there was a preparation for the peak. Now with the fast track, we’re really ready to onboard them very close to the big season operation were telling us that it’s so easy to onboard that even two or three weeks prior to the big season, we could onboard them. So if you compare the track or the speed at which we used to onboard customers in the previous years, providing we had the contract, of course, it adds some, I would say, easily a quarter, an additional quarter in terms of time frame to onboard these customers to already contribute to the current 2025 profile.
Analyst: Okay. That’s very elaborate. And then maybe on tariff impact. You had on the slide a few risks, a few opportunities. But is there any direct impact you’re already seeing or potentially might be seeing from potentially some of your apparel clients that have, all of a sudden, less inflow from Asia lines or because they make their stuff maybe in Asia, shipping them to The U.
S, maybe then they’re stuck in containers somewhere. Do you see any impact, whether it’s front loading ahead of tariffs or on hold because the tariffs are coming? Do you see anything there?
Chris Peters, CEO, Bipost Group: No. At this point of time, we don’t see it within the radial operation. We have many discussions with clients. Many clients are considering a number of alternative options, but also everybody is waiting before they make the decision. We see the same for additional fulfillment activities that people see to avoid cross border activities.
So you see a number of these things that are evaluated by clients, but most of our clients are in holding mode and are operating as they operated before with, of course, the, let’s say, the consumer confidence effect that we have seen over the few weeks.
Philippe Dortien, CFO, Bipost Group: But like for some of the No, no, ahead. I will come
Analyst: back afterwards. Yes. Are they building building down, say, their inventory levels that you see that in fulfillment? Or
Chris Peters, CEO, Bipost Group: No. No. We don’t see we don’t see anything of that today. I think that today, most people are in preparation mode, but also in waiting mode until we get full clarity on what is going to happen because as we all have seen, yeah, a lot of announcement, less, let’s say, implementation these days. And so a lot of people are having discussions with us how we can help them in case of such an implementation will happen but are not yet in execution mode.
Philippe Dortien, CFO, Bipost Group: So what I wanted to add is that on part of our customer portfolio, there is indeed a lot of stuff coming from China. But from others, the impact of the tariffs on their cost of sale is rather limited. So some of the customers, typically when it’s high end type of product, the impact would be minimal. And this, to industry and also in our portfolio. We have we are exposed to multiple type of customers and industries.
Analyst: Okay. Okay. Then a very small one to finish off. I saw, I think, in the press release that you also had some lower pay for absence. I guess, that’s then that you don’t pay when they’re on strike or so.
Is it how should I read that?
Philippe Dortien, CFO, Bipost Group: Exactly when they are covered by the unions, they are covered by the unions and not paid by those. Okay, okay. That’s what it is. Okay, clear.
Analyst: Thanks very much. That’s it from my side.
Philippe Dortien, CFO, Bipost Group: Thank you. Thank you.
Conference Operator: We currently have no question in the queue. So a final reminder, the very final reminder. Well, there are no further questions. So I will hand it back to Chris to conclude today’s conference.
Chris Peters, CEO, Bipost Group: Yes. We would like to thank then everybody in the call for having taken the time to be with us and for your interesting questions. As a reminder, Bipose will hold its Annual Shareholder Meeting next Wednesday, and our second quarter results will be released on August 8. In the meantime, we look forward to staying in touch and welcoming you at our Capital Markets Day on June 3. Thank you very much, and have a nice day.
Philippe Dortien, CFO, Bipost Group: Thank you. Thank you.
Conference Operator: Thank you for joining today’s call. You may now disconnect.
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