Estonia, EU – Baltic States, Post Office, Technology, Transport

The terminals enable people to send and recieve packages and they’re located in shopping-centers with long opening hours. The person recieving a parcel gets an SMS and can pick it up whenever he or she sees fit, doesn't have to set the schedule according to post office working hours, avoiding lines and do it while buying groceries for example.

A good parallel for this is the ATM: 10 years ago people were sceptical about getting cash from a "hole in the wall" but nowadays most of us don't see any reason for going to the bank office for that reason.

The guys at SP are also actively looking for possibilities to export the technology: the first terminal has been set up in Milan, Italy as a pilot project and a service enabling sending parcels from Estonia to Finland has just been launched.

The service really took off in December, when about 33 000 parcels were sent via SmartPOST. That's the same amount that was sent in the previous 6 months combined. A sign of popularity is also the fact that SP's Facebook page has nearly 9000 fans, making it the most popular Estonian commercial page popular (Forum Cinemas is first).

The company was also state-owned Development Fund’s first (and biggest so far) investment. In November they got the Logistics Deed of the Year 2009 award.

SmartPOST isn’t the first one to produce such a terminal (an Austrian company called Keba in association with German DHL was the first one), but SP’s technology has quite a few differences and advantages, concluded Martin Kõiva.