What next for Hermes?
The delivery giant has had a bumper year, but faces a new challenge, says its UK CEO. By any standards Hermes UK's numbers are huge. It handles 640 million parcels a year. Its app has been downloaded 5.7 million times. It has a network of 30,000 couriers. Its posted seven years of consecutive double digit growth, and its turnover last year topped 860m. Not that everyone always knows it. I think sometimes that gets underestimated, says Dutch-born CEO Martijn de Lange. The last year has put it firmly in the spotlight. The rise of ecommerce in the US, Japan, UK and increasingly China has meant that parcel volume was already growing (the compound annual growth rate was 19% between 2013 and 2019, according to Pitney Bowes Parcel Shipping Index) before the pandemic.