this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2023
37 points (100.0% liked)

Australia

3588 readers
123 users here now

A place to discuss Australia and important Australian issues.

Before you post:

If you're posting anything related to:

If you're posting Australian News (not opinion or discussion pieces) post it to Australian News

Rules

This community is run under the rules of aussie.zone. In addition to those rules:

Banner Photo

Congratulations to @[email protected] who had the most upvoted submission to our banner photo competition

Recommended and Related Communities

Be sure to check out and subscribe to our related communities on aussie.zone:

Plus other communities for sport and major cities.

https://aussie.zone/communities

Moderation

Since Kbin doesn't show Lemmy Moderators, I'll list them here. Also note that Kbin does not distinguish moderator comments.

Additionally, we have our instance admins: @[email protected] and @[email protected]

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
37
Australia Post reports $200m annual loss, its first since 2015, amid push to close city branches (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
17 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I can't find anywhere listing what we get in UPU fees for things coming into Australia from China

IIRC there's an excel spreadsheet somewhere with the pricing, but it's in the UPUs own currency or something like that.

The minimum cost of anything coming out of China should be the UPU.

I'm pretty sure 'free shipping' is just someone else eats the cost of shipping.

Edit:

Keeping in mind that I have no idea how to properly read this, as for the pricing it looks like in 2016 letter post from Hong Kong to Sydney was 0.538 SDR per KG, which was about AU$1.03 per KG.

Also the 77c for the head torch is a one time welcome deal, it shows up as $8.97 for me when logged in. So Aliexpress is probably just making a loss in hopes to make a profit from you later.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Keeping in mind that I have no idea how to properly read this, as for the pricing it looks like in 2016 letter post from Hong Kong to Sydney was 0.538 SDR per KG, which was about AU$1.03 per KG.

Interesting, so on face value, that works out to about $5 for a max 5kg package to arrive from China, whereas the same 5kg package within Australia would be $10.60.
Either Australia Post is taking a loss on every international package, or making a big profit on every national package.
Possibly both, where one offsets the other.
Whilst that would keep Australia Post solvent, it has externalities, simplistically it's a tarif on local manufactured product.
That cannot be a desirable outcome, especially as China already has a $/man hour advantage.

Also the 77c for the head torch is a one time welcome deal, it shows up as $8.97 for me when logged in. So Aliexpress is probably just making a loss in hopes to make a profit from you later.

Yeah, entirely possible. I haven't ordered one of these and don't intend to, but I just bought some screw drivers etc for ~ $8, which means they would have to make them for like $4 to turn a profit.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Whilst that would keep Australia Post solvent, it has externalities, simplistically it’s a tarif on local manufactured product.

I've also heard that Amazon and similar 'mass senders' have special deals with postage companies, so most locally manufactured stuff would probably be fairly cheap to post, and they increase the price for normal people to send.