Last mentioned: Jun 28, 2026
Ofcom launches investigation
The regulator opens a formal probe into Royal Mail's failure to meet its delivery obligations over the past year.
Nationwide delivery overhaul begins
Following a union agreement, Royal Mail rolls out new schedules: Saturday deliveries end and second-class mail is delivered every other weekday across 1,200 offices.
Targets missed for second consecutive year
Royal Mail reports that only 75.7% of first-class mail was delivered next day and 90.2% of second-class within three days, missing Ofcom's thresholds.
Fiscal year-end
IDS reports annual results: Royal Mail revenues rise to £8.4 billion, but group earnings fall 20% due to GLS woes.
Ofcom record £21M fine
Royal Mail is fined a record £21 million by regulator Ofcom for missing delivery targets during the 2024-25 financial year.
EP Group completes acquisition of IDS
Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky's EP Group finalizes the purchase of International Distribution Services, taking Royal Mail and GLS private.
Despite a 7% increase in parcel volumes to 1.4 billion, Royal Mail’s operating profit fell 51% to £96 million as labour costs and NIC hikes took their toll. The company is overhauling its universal service to cut costs, while its international parcel arm GLS also stumbled.
Royal Mail's FY26 numbers reveal a diverging parcel-driven future: volumes climbed 7% to 1.4 billion while letters sank 10% to 5.7 billion. The logistics giant is now rolling out a radical schedule overhaul—scrapping Saturday delivery and shifting to every-other-day second-class—across 1,200 offices, but a £21M fine and a new Ofcom probe underline the operational risks.
This page surfaces every story mentioning International Distribution Services (IDS) across our supply chain coverage. We track each entity's appearance over time so readers can trace how the narrative evolves — which developments are isolated incidents, which build into longer arcs, and which reframe how operators in the space think about the entity. Story selection uses the same multi-source verification gate applied across the rest of our coverage.
Read our editorial methodology for how we identify, deduplicate, and score entity references. Our glossary defines the technical terms used across stories on this page, and our trends index contextualizes individual developments against the longer-running supply chain beat. Cross-entity comparisons live on our compare view.
| What you see | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Story count | Number of distinct stories where International Distribution Services (IDS) was a primary or referenced actor. |
| Recency clustering | Whether mentions are concentrated in a recent window (a news cycle) or distributed (a sustained arc). |
| Sentiment distribution | Aggregate sentiment of the stories mentioning this entity, weighted by impact score. |
| Cross-niche links | When the same entity surfaces in our sibling networks, we link to those views to enrich context. |