JOHANNESBURG – South Africa's Post Office has cleared the backlog in its depots that affected the delivery of items to customers, the state-owned entity said on Thursday.
"SAPO worked tirelessly to resolve the factors causing the processing backlog. It is pleasing to report that these issues have now been addressed and the backlog is resolved," CEO Mark Barnes said.
Depots at SAPO, whose present inflows of items have peaked at 2.8 million items daily, accumulated processing backlogs due to a month long nationwide strike which was resolved in July, as well as the withdrawal of transport services by suppliers over late payments.
On Thursday it said delivery fleets had been restored and the utility had benefited from a capital allocation of R2.9bn to fund its operations and settle amounts owed to suppliers.
"The processing of international mail has improved and the articles that are behind delivery schedules have reduced notably," Barnes said.
"The volume of international mail on hand is 1.3m. We expect the processing of international items to be brought within standard once a number of interventions are fully implemented."
He said SAPO had designated a dedicated processing line to speed up the handling of smaller online shopping based items that constituted the bulk of the current international volumes.
International items take longer to process as they have to be scanned to ensure that they do not contain contraband items and each incoming parcel has to be assessed for possible import duty.