Thank you, President. Thank you Mario, and thank you to the entire presiding table, to Secretary General Fumarola, to Secretary Roscigno, to the present Secretaries Gallotta, Fasciana, and Moscarella, and obviously to all the delegates and all the representatives present. Trying to keep my intervention contained after, I must say, the very exhaustive, thorough, and profound intervention of the Secretary General, which I appreciated very much. I won't repeat all the good things we've done together, but I feel it's important even if only to make sure that in 20 today we can joke about us the way we joked about Corrado Passera today. One moment. [Applause]
Since I believe Corrado Passera did good things for this company, and I believe we've discussed it with Mario and Raffaele on several occasions, I think it's appropriate to give Caesar what belongs to Caesar and start from when in 2017 Mario essentially described it as a mess. But honestly, it wasn't a mess operationally. The problem with our company in 2017 was a very serious problem. I would call it existential.
The then finance director who was leaving the company, Luigi Ferraris, to go and become CEO of Terna, from which I was coming as CEO, handed me over all the numbers and said, 'Look, we have about 1.5 billion in gains from government bonds. We need about, and you all remember this, 500 million per year. At three years of life, this salami has three slices, but then we need to come up with something.' Why did we need to come up with something? Because unfortunately we had been distracted. We had been distracted because the State had created some years earlier a company called PagoPA which by law became the instrument first for all public administrations and then for all companies active in public services, from Enel to Telecom to all municipalized companies, for making payments.
So from having the payments world that allowed us to have 700 million in annual revenue from our postal slip, they took it away from us. By the way, and we're now reiterating this in every forum, previously the Italian paid 1.50 euros in the post office for the postal slip, and out of that 1.50 Poste had a margin. Today the Italian pays 2.75 euros at a bar or tobacco shop, and PagoPA, which operates this circuit and this payment, has no margin. So one wonders where those 2.75 euros go — they go to the tobacco shop, the bar, and the companies operating that service.
So the State did, speaking with respect, Robin Hood in reverse. Where were we distracted? Besides in the payments world by that date, obviously in the logistics world. I don't need to tell you this, it's the famous story we've told ourselves many times. In Italy we are sixth — the first is a French company, the second is a German, the third is an American, the fourth is an American, the fifth is British, the sixth is us. The first five make profits, and we in logistics since 2017 have been losing money. So also in logistics, from a strategic point of view, we were distracted. We were distracted because financial services in general — so from this point of view, the good Corrado Passera had given a positive input that allowed us to have some tailwind from 2000 to 2014-17. But let's say Bartolini, which Passera had bought — because we had bought it, ladies and gentlemen, do you remember? It was ours — we sold it. So when I arrived, not only had Poste resold it in two tranches, first selling the option and then selling the shares.
And Daniele Bartolini, the owner, said: 'Look, I would have very much liked to work with Poste, that's why I sold my shares, but then it didn't work out and Poste sold me.' I arrive in 2017 and in 2016 Daniele Bartolini goes to Paris and sells Bartolini to La Poste. The CEO of La Poste told me when he showed up in my office, 'I looked around to see if there were cameras because maybe it was a joke, because the jewel of Italian logistics with a European profile was coming to Paris to offer itself for sale and the Italian government was doing nothing.' So another moment in which we were distracted.
I must give credit — in this distraction, excuse me, November 2016, a general strike was carried out, rightly I might add, by the unions. A new distribution model was implemented halfway, with little conviction about the model's effectiveness. And here I must truly give recognition and, as was said, great foresight from the unions, from the other organizations that supported us, and in particular from the president and true friend Mario, who I remember — I can tell you, but let's also go quickly — in which hotel. We were there: me, Dr. Lasco, and Mario. We explained again that we had to move forward, that we would make some modifications, but we had no alternative.
And Mario looked at us and said: 'All right, honestly I'm not sure — do you remember, Mario? — one hundred percent that this is the best path, but I agree with you that right now we have no alternative. We are with you.' From there we've come a long way. We understood that beyond parcels we had to focus on payments — it didn't take much. Payments were obviously becoming less paper-based and more digital, and with cards then digital, so we invested, we created Postepay. In 2017, one billion transactions; this year we'll do over three billion, so three times as much. Parcels became our real challenge. In 2017 we did 113 million parcels. Of these 113, our mail carriers delivered only 15 million in 2000. This year we'll go from 113 to over three times that, and of these 350 million, our mail carriers will deliver 145 million, with the percentage of deliveries by our mail carriers over the total parcels delivered by Poste continuously increasing.
This aligns with the project that from a strategic point of view, not only for Poste but for the entire sector — I look here at the representatives of the other unions — the creation of the new Corriere network, because that will be the reference point not only for our company but for the entire sector, which is a sector that has suffered greatly also from the standpoint of worker protection in the context of last-mile delivery. It's an activity we have wired with an extremely high technological content because this allows us to optimize and be as efficient as possible. But it's an activity that in the coming — let's say within the plan horizon, so by 2028 — will bring about 66 to 70 percent, we hope all parcels delivered by Poste to be delivered by one of our postal workers. And this is clearly a historic and structural change.
All of this, what has it allowed us? It has allowed us from 2017 — and I'll project to 2027 to look at ten years — to rebalance, or we could stop at this year, to rebalance our revenues. It was a company that in 2017 had 10.6 billion in revenues. Let's take 2025, what we'll do this year — from 10.6, we go to 12.5. So we've grown by 2 billion overall, but above all we have replaced 500 million in postal revenues, we have replaced 300-400 million in postal slip revenues, with activities we didn't have before, which are in payments and in parcels and in insurance services. So a truly structural change in our business that allows us to look to the future in sectors we know are growing.
Raffaele was talking about the number of deliveries per person. We need to be clear about this. We've now reached, the latest data tell us, 30 deliveries per capita per Italian per year. The year has 52 weeks. We're more or less at one delivery every 11 days per capita, and the revenue that Poste makes on that delivery every 11 days per Italian is one euro. So if we only did mail — and it's true, since 2012 we've halved mail revenues from 4 billion to 2 billion today — if we only did mail we would collect one euro every 11 days from each Italian for a total of 2 billion euros. The labor cost alone in the logistics area is three billion. So certainly with a 5% declining trend, we had also forgotten about the competitive aspect, because there's a piece of history in this room — there was a company called Nexive, so at a time when volumes were dropping, we were also competing with a company that was lowering prices.
So your volumes dropped and your prices dropped. At the end of it, we found ourselves delivering bills or bank account statements or Enel statements at 22 cents — 22 cents, right? — for all the work behind that operation. There are on average 300 kilometers of travel from the sorting center to the delivery center, on average 10 cents per piece. So these were not businesses on which we could remain and project into the future. We managed to take our direction and completely change the heading and the bow of the ship. The results are obviously visible to everyone. What I want to say is that it's certainly useless for me to talk about stock performance and that it went very well — this isn't the place for that.
Here perhaps it's important to remember, and I insist, that in this journey from 2017 — let's project it to 2027 — of growth in performance, the finance director Ferraris told me, 'Look, you have three years.' We can say that what was approximately one billion that the company made in 2017 without capital gains has today become more than three billion. OK? And consequently, obviously, a company that makes more margins, makes more profits, pays more dividends to shareholders. But the obvious question becomes: does it pay more dividends to shareholders and that's it? Or is there also recognition of the labor factor?
And obviously in this journey we have recognized, Raffaele, a contract increment currently in force that is greater than the labor component as a remuneration increase for our colleagues compared to what we recognized to shareholders. Getting here has allowed us not only to have the contract of which we are equally proud from July 2024 — I won't remind you of the numbers of the active policies that the Secretary General reminded us of — but it has allowed us to be a company that protects its employees more. In 2017, our employees didn't have a health insurance policy provided by Poste. It was provided by this management in 2017-2018.
We didn't have other welfare services, which have grown and which we continue to integrate with the help of the cooperation of your organizations. But it has allowed us to have credibility in the sector and in the market to be able to say there are synergies, it's a sector in difficulty. We consider it an opportunity. We make an important investment in a company close to us, even if technically in a different sector, like Team. So it's also thanks to all the work done together in this transformation over these nine years that we've lived together, that we had the credibility that five years ago would have been simply unthinkable as a possibility. Perhaps eight years ago one might have imagined the opposite situation, in which Team had the resources to help Poste. In this case we had the market opportunity but above all the systemic credibility to take a step like this.
So I don't know, Mario, whether as you said at the last congress, this will probably be my last congress or not. But I thank everyone, first and foremost my friend Mario for the journey we've made together, and I learned what it means to be a good union leader from Mario Petitto. In that vein, along with the Director General, we welcomed with open arms our friend Raffaele, who will certainly carry this next step of Poste forward in the best way and I believe we can deliver in any scenario. When this board of directors' mandate ends in March, in all scenarios across these nine years we can say we have delivered a more solid, more conscious, more useful company to the country.
At a time when I agree with the Secretary General's intervention again, the challenges are becoming much more important because we don't fully realize, perhaps, the changes that artificial intelligence is about to bring to companies and to the world of work in general. They may be more disruptive than we ourselves today can capture or foresee, and perhaps it's also our role to try to use this tool in the best way to protect first and foremost the work of all our colleagues and of the system, because Poste is the system, and consequently by protecting the work of all our colleagues we protect the future of this company. Thank you. [Applause]
