Posten (Sweden)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Posten AB

Type	Government enterprise
Founded	1636
Headquarters	Sweden
Products	Mail
Revenue	25.277 billion SEK (2005)
Employees	30,000
Website	www.posten.se

A Swedish postman in Husby, Stockholm.

Axel Oxenstierna, founder of the Swedish postal service. Stamp, 1936.

Posten is the name of the Swedish postal service. The word "posten" means "the post" or "the mail" in Swedish.

Posten was established in 1636 by Axel Oxenstierna, even though origins can be traced further back, and it was operated as a government agency into the 1990s when it was transformed into a government owned limited company. Among the biggest changes to the postal service, as seen by the public, was the decision in 2000 to abandon the service maintained at the public post offices in 2001.

The public today handles their postal business at so called Postal Service Points, which are maintained in grocery shops and gas stations. Postal Service Centres are maintained for business clients and Svensk Kassaservice, a chain of shops that handles simple financial transactions but offers no postal services.

In addition to regular mail Posten also the largest distributor of direct mail (addressed and unadressed) in Sweden (annual report 2005, pg.18 [1]).

Mail and package delivery is seen as very reliable in Sweden, but it has undergone large scale organisational changes and rationalisation in the last decade. Nevertheless, it is under ever increasing competition from private companies on the Swedish deregulated postal market. The main competitor being the former private (as of 2006 nationalised by Norway) company CityMail.