Courier companies are overloaded

Courier companies are these days facing demand comparable to the pre-Christmas period or Black Friday, as the coronavirus crisis has sent their workload soaring. However, the conditions they have to operate in are tough, and they are now scrambling to adapt to meet the jump in demand as a result of households' rapid swing toward online commerce.

Apostolos Georgantzis, chairman and chief executive at ACS Courier, which has the largest market share (around 35 percent) and employs some 3,000 people, tells Kathimerini that demand for deliveries was steady in the first half of March. The shuttering of stores came with a drop in demand, but the latter skyrocketed in the last week of March, with the increase coming to an extra 50,000 deliveries on a daily basis.

"Compared to the same period in 2019, demand per day has risen by 50 percent on average. We could say that every...