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DHL is one of the players in the "absolutely, positively has to be there the next day" business.
My little company (four people) used to spend several thousand a year just on Fedex. We produce plans (think architect - we're not, but kinda like them .... anyway ..... ) and lots of pages of stuff that always accompanies such plans. Sometimes we'd have to send out four, six, eight, more copies of everything. That shipping bill by itself could easily be a few hundred bucks.
Fedex invented the genre. UPS (an older company) joined in this high end part of the small parcel delivery business. So did other companies.
Including DHL.
And then along came e-mail.
And Adobe Acrobat.
And ftp sites.
And paperless bidding.
And laptops on job sites in place of paper plans.
And the "absolutely, positively has to be there the next day" business was starting to slow down.
UPS had an older business that was still thriving.
Fedex got into that part of the small package delivery business, too, with Fedex Ground.
DHL didn't. But even if they did, the field was getting crowded for a declining/contracting marketplace.
Then Fedex raced ahead of them all. They bought Kinkos and combined two business.
It is now cheaper and faster, when a client has to have paper, to e-mail everything to the Kinkos nearest him, have them print it all (large scale drawings and the reams of paper that accompanies it) and deliver it to the client by bike or on foot. For clients in big cities, this is actually cheaper than doing it in house and paying delivery. Just send it to the Kinkos nearest the client office and its done.
The business changed.
The "absolutely, positively has to be there the next day" business is substantially less than it was before. And if that was your core business, you're gone.
And that, pretty much, is what happened to DHL.
DOA ...... natural causes.
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