Value

The Value pillar focuses on unlocking value by improving consumer experience, strengthening margins and making smart use of our assets. In 2025, value creation was supported not only by disciplined yield management and operational excellence, but also by the growing impact of our digital propositions, which help consumers manage their deliveries with greater control and convenience. Throughout the year, we continued to shift our focus from volume to value, embedding more sophisticated pricing, product and customer-mix steering across all business segments.

In Parcels, this meant optimising our commercial portfolio, strengthening contractual discipline, and aligning capacity with value-accretive growth. At Mail in the Netherlands, we advanced measures to safeguard a financially viable postal service in a structurally declining market through selective pricing, cost control, and further network optimisation.

Creating strong consumer foundations

In 2025, we continued to enhance value creation by improving the digital consumer journey and strengthening the ‘happy flow’, the seamless, reliable experience that defines every interaction with PostNL. Guided by consumer feedback and behavioural insights, we refined our digital propositions to ensure simplicity, transparency, and control across all channels. For example, the introduction of the feedback button within the PostNL app and website provided real-time insights into customer experience, enabling faster service improvements and more personalised support.

We also gave receivers more control over their parcel deliveries, for example by expanding the number of OOH options, a core element of our consumer-satisfaction strategy and one of the features that truly sets us apart. Growing adoption of delivery preferences in the PostNL app enabled more customers to choose how, where and when they wanted their parcels delivered. This helped reduce not-at-home attempts and further improved first-time-right delivery performance. Building on this success, we are extending this capability to Belgium to personalise the last mile across borders and create a more consistent and reliable experience for consumers.

During the year, we continued to refine our position in the small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) segment, a key priority under Breakthrough 2028. We further refined our customer journey, making it faster and easier for SME webshops to become PostNL customers, often within minutes rather than days.

To improve satisfaction and retention, we also enhanced churn management, lifecycle marketing, and intermediary policies, ensuring customers receive the right mix of direct and partner-based services. These and the steps outlined above create a stronger, more personal connection with SMEs and position PostNL as a trusted logistics and e-commerce partner, growing alongside customers by offering the right support at every stage of their development.

These initiatives directly contributed to our Reptrak score, which again placed PostNL among the most trusted and positively regarded logistics companies in the Netherlands. Our ISO 9001 certification remained high at 98% (2024: 98%). By aligning digital convenience with operational excellence, we continue to reinforce customer satisfaction, loyalty, and brand strength, which are key drivers of sustainable value creation.

Enhancing logistics flow

In 2025, we took the first major steps towards transforming our first- and middle-mile transport network into a new wave-based model, which is a significant operational change and will benefit parcel and mail delivery. The new design replaces fixed time-based routes with multiple daily 'waves', enabling smarter, more balanced planning across the day. This allows us to distribute workload more evenly, reduce peaks, and create better work packages for our transport team, while improving overall network reliability and predictability.

With more evenly spread collection and delivery moments, flows can be planned more efficiently, leading to fewer delays, steadier service levels and improved on-time performance, particularly during peak periods, helping ensure consumers enjoy more predictable arrival times and a smoother overall experience.

Throughout the year, we focused on planning, piloting, and preparing for the 2026 rollout phase. The wave network will be implemented in stages through to 2029, with the first operational gains already visible in 2025 through smarter scheduling, structural order planning, and improved coordination between collection and delivery. These changes are designed not only to lower costs per parcel and letter, but also to support our broader sustainability goals through lower-emission logistics and greater use of renewable energy.

In Belgium, reliability remains crucial for consumers and senders, a market-wide need that extends beyond PostNL. Despite this broader context, in 2025 we delivered strong improvements across our network, with complaints and losses declining year-on-year. Overall on-time delivery rose, while domestic parcels achieved 99% on-time performance. Time-slot deliveries also improved sharply. These gains place us ahead of several competitors in operational consistency in Belgium, reinforcing reliability as a key differentiator in a market where service quality varies widely. A more disciplined approach to managing network capacity also supports long-term value creation, ensuring that new volume strengthens productivity and avoids dependence on low-yield flows.

Redesign product pricing architecture

Parcels advanced the redesign of its product and pricing architecture, creating greater flexibility in our customer propositions, and supporting a shift from a volume-based to a value-based approach. We implemented regular price adjustments and targeted yield measures, establishing stronger links between true cost drivers, such as size, weight, format and handling profile, and our rate cards. In parallel, we embedded revenue and capacity management principles more deeply across the network, optimising for day-of-week spread and asset utilisation rather than volume alone. This included steering demand towards OOH options to improve network economics. This increase in OOH options, such as APLs, supports our commitment to Value by helping increase first-time-right delivery rates and giving consumers greater choice in how and when they receive their parcels. These strategic choices led to modest market share loss, particularly in the fourth quarter. However, we have also seen that they created positive momentum to improve higher-value customer relationships. Together, the measures will support disciplined growth, enable smarter yield management, reward reliability and quality, reduce pricing complexity, and lay the foundation for sustainable margin improvement over the long term.

Strengthening operational performance

Delivery quality for Parcels remained strong throughout 2025. Enhanced forecasting and control-room coordination helped maintain reliable service levels for both consumers and business customers. Additionally, to further strengthen operational performance we introduced a new leadership model across the Netherlands, separating responsibilities for people management, process control, and planning support. This structure creates clearer accountability and enables more effective coaching for teams.

In parallel, at Parcels within the Netherlands we further rolled out our plan to balance the delivery workforce at around 50% employed staff and 50% delivery partners (2025: 30% employed staff). Early indicators show higher engagement and a reduction in short-term absenteeism, supported by the continued roll-out of the Managing Employability programme (Sturen op Inzetbaarheid) from Mail in the Netherlands to Parcels. These developments strengthen our overall value proposition by improving wellbeing, employability, and productivity, which in turn contribute to sustainable value creation for the company and our stakeholders.

Stabilising Mail in the Netherlands

Mail has proven to be essential for people and organisations across the Netherlands, and our postal network remains a key part of the country’s social infrastructure, ensuring everyone, regardless of age, ability or location, can stay connected. We are adapting our operations to ensure stability for the upcoming years and continue to guarantee accessibility to essential services such as medical mail, voting passes and other time-sensitive communication.

“Guided by consumer feedback and behavioural insights, we refined our digital propositions to ensure simplicity, transparency, and control across all channels”

At the start of the year we completed a major operational migration by moving virtually all 24 hour business mail to a two-day (D+2) standard. The change was executed safely and predictably, with clear customer communication and disciplined planning at sites and in the field. Early customer feedback has been positive, reflecting better alignment between service promises and actual needs. Internally, we absorbed role reductions largely via natural attrition and responsible redeployment.

For PostNL, 2025 was purposefully a year of stabilisation at Mail in the Netherlands. We reset our operating model to strengthen local leadership and accountability, brought decision-making closer to the work floor, and re-introduced a hands-on lean cadence at sorting and preparation. Site-based improvement teams, supported by experienced coaches, now drive daily performance huddles, visual management, and standard work. We also recalibrated delivery route times with and for our deliverers. By aligning planned working hours more closely to reality, we improved fairness, predictability, and satisfaction. Pulse surveys throughout the year showed encouraging improvements in engagement among deliverers.

We continued to evolve our portfolio in line with customer demand for non-time-critical services. In July, we launched a pilot with a number of customers for a letterbox parcel delivered within two days, establishing this as the new standard for the format, with formal introduction from the start of 2026. This complements the e-commerce commercial offerings and offers customers a cost-effective, predictable alternative where 'next day' is not required.

On the digital side, we delivered practical, low-investment innovations that improve the 'happy flow': smarter use of GPS support for deliverers (currently in the test phase), and simplified label functionality. These are incremental rather than disruptive, and deliberately sized to our footprint and capex discipline. We also piloted a secure registered e-mail solution, offering customers a digital alternative for legally verifiable correspondence.

We took stronger action against counterfeit stamps and stamp codes, particularly in the area of mail and small parcels. By adapting our existing machine-vision technology to also check items that cannot be processed automatically, we were able to detect and stop more fraudulent items. We worked closely with involved senders and online platforms to address the issue at its source and, in some cases, we temporarily held items clearly marked as counterfeit to make receivers aware of the problem and help trace the routes used by online sellers. This approach shows how we can use our own expertise and technology to reduce revenue loss effectively, without major new investments.