How Ukraine Delivers the Mail During Wartime

Tracy Alloway (0:02)

Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts, radio, news.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:22)

And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:23)

Joe, do you ever order stuff online?

Joe Weisenthal (0:26)

Yesterday.

Tracy Alloway (0:26)

I don't mean just like Amazon day-to-day stuff. I mean, like, do you go out looking for interesting things to buy online?

Joe Weisenthal (0:33)

Every once in a while, I get the edge. You know what I bought yesterday?

Tracy Alloway (0:35)

What? A guitar.

Joe Weisenthal (0:36)

No, I don't have a lot of guitars online, too many. A hat from the 90s from the Bureau of Reclamation celebrating like the 50th anniversary of the building of the Hoover Dam.

Tracy Alloway (0:51)

Wait, I want one.

Joe Weisenthal (0:53)

Yeah, it's really cool.

Tracy Alloway (0:53)

It's a baseball cap.

Joe Weisenthal (0:54)

I'll show it to you after this. It's really cool. I'm going to wear it at our next concert. I think it's really cool looking.

Tracy Alloway (0:58)

I am very jealous.

Joe Weisenthal (0:59)

Yeah, it's a good one.

Tracy Alloway (1:00)

All right. Well, I buy stuff all the time. My husband does a similar thing and buys lots of vintage, not baseball hats, but rugby shirts.

Joe Weisenthal (1:09)

Oh, that's cool.

Tracy Alloway (1:10)

And the other day, he ordered a rugby shirt off of eBay and it showed up a few weeks later. And to both of our surprise, it had come from Ukraine and specifically a place called Zaporizhzhya.

Joe Weisenthal (1:22)

And it was not like a Ukrainian jersey or something like that. It just happened to be sent from Ukraine.

Tracy Alloway (1:27)

It happened to be sent from Ukraine. I can't remember exactly which jersey it was, but I was kind of surprised because it was in this like perfect little box. It took a while to get to the US, but not an inordinate amount of time.

And it piqued my interest and it got me thinking, how in the world is the Ukraine still shipping things in the middle of a military conflict?

Joe Weisenthal (1:49)

Yeah, I mean, it's pretty striking. You know, we've talked one time about palates in the context of the war and this idea that like logistics is the key to keeping everything going and good disciplined logistics, et cetera.

But the idea that you could quickly get a pristine package from eBay to the US in the middle of an ongoing conflict is extraordinary and raises questions about like, how do you keep day to day operations of a sort of crucial delivery infrastructure, such as postal service, whether shipping internationally or just shipping domestically going under such extreme conditions?

Tracy Alloway (2:24)

Right, and also how does the role of the postal service actually change during wartime? I imagine shipping rugby's to my husband in the US is probably not an essential service at the moment, but Ukraine is using the postal service to send medicines and aids and cash and things like that. So we should talk about this.

Joe Weisenthal (2:43)

I'd love to.

Tracy Alloway (2:43)

And I am very pleased to say we do in fact have the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with Igor Smelyansky. He is the CEO of the Ukrainian national postal operator Ukrposhta. And before heading Ukraine's postal service, he also worked at KPMG and Boston Consulting Group. So really a perfect Odd Lots guest, a supply chain expert with a side interest in finance. That's how I'm putting it.

Joe Weisenthal (3:08)

Let's do it.

Tracy Alloway (3:08)

All right, Igor, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.

Igor Smelyansky (3:11)

Thank you for inviting me.

Tracy Alloway (3:13)

So first of all, thank you for getting packages to me.

I appreciate it. My husband appreciates it. I have since ordered things that came from Kiev as well, knowingly ordered stuff from Kiev, and those also came in pristine condition. Can you describe maybe just the challenges that the postal service is facing at the moment? How much have things changed now versus, you know, pre-2022?

Igor Smelyansky (3:38)

I mean, obviously it had changed a lot. Like as an example, we used to have five flights per week to New York, which would allow us to quickly deliver parcels to the US. And by the way, parcels to the US is about 50% of our export volumes. Over 1.3 million Ukrainian SKUs are sold on Amazon, eBay and Etsy.

So it's actually thousands of small businesses jobs, people that do things for the dogs, fashion, Ukrainian fashion is very popular, things for the houses. So and we understood that if you stop delivering, these people will lose their jobs. And you can imagine during the war, you cannot get the jobs easily. And so we had to face in one day that there are no more flights. There are no flights from Ukraine. At the same time, if you don't deliver on time on eBay or Amazon or Etsy, your rating as a seller drops. So which is why we had to do what we could to make sure things are delivered. And we moved to new logistical routes. So during the war, hopefully not that many people know it, but during the war you have a curfew, which means you cannot drive at night.