Pos Malaysia's New International Postal Rates - Updated

Pos Malaysia's 

New International Postage Rates:
An Attempt to Explain Which May Confuse

I was slightly puzzled when I was charged RM60 to send a 0.5kg grm paperback by airmail to Europe last week. The observant and helpful postal assistant spotted me and pressed into my palm a booklet setting out new international rates that have just come into force. Don't worry, Malaysian residents, domestic rates have not changed - yet. All books bought from The Penang Bookshelf are still posted free of charge to addresses within Malaysia.

I've spent most of my waking hours since then trying to understand the rates and to re-jig The Penang Bookshelf's international selling sites to reflect them. What follows may rightly be extremely boring to most, but I hope will be helpful to some.

The two most important changes are that a) all rates start at 1kg and b) cheap surface mail has disappeared. 

So although it now costs SG$18 to send a 0.5kg book to Singapore, two books of the same weight would cost the same price, i.e. still a total of $18. Whereas 2kg of books to Singapore will cost $21 compared to $34 under the old rates. Similar savings exist in posting to other countires in Southeast Asia. 

Most of The Penang Bookshelf's overseas customers are in Australia. Here a 0.5kg book will cost AU$22 to post, but because the first step in the postage rates is now 1kg, again two or more books under 1kg will also cost $22 in total. That compares with $15 for 1kg under the old rates, so there's a 50% increase there. 2 kg will cost $31 compared with $27 under the old system, so the increase is softened, the more books you buy. However it's still possible to send books by surface mail to Australia where the rates range from $17 for 1kg, $20 up 1.5kg and $22 for 2kg, Unfortunately New Zealand customers lose out here. Theirs is one of the many strange cases where surface mail is either the same as or more expensive than airmail, but the airmail rates are the same as in the case of Australia.

Moving over to Europe now, the scene is more foggy. The UK is another case where surface mail is pretty well the same price as airmail, so to post by airmail any books weighing under 1 kg will now cost £16 while a 2kg parcel would cost £22. This compares with £13 for 1kg under the old rates and £24 for 2kg. So actually a bigger bundle of books is cheaper to send now than it was before.

Whereas under the old system all of Europe was subjected to one rate, now, for some reason, Pos Malaysia's decided to pick and choose when it comes to surface mail. However let's deal with air mail first. For airmail the situation for all of Europe is the same as before. It's in the same band as the UK so that  anything up to 1kg is 19 Euros to post rising to 26 Euros when the package weighs between 1.5 and 2kg. Under the old system it was 16 Euros for 1kg and 29 Euros for a 2kg packet. So, as with the case of the UK, it's cheaper now than before to send heavier parcels by airmail.

Whereas airmail to the UK is now the cheapest option, that's not so with the rest of Europe. Nevertheless surprisingly surface mail rates are not uniform as they were before. For some reason Austria, the Czech Republic and Luxembourg, which are landlocked, and Denmark and Ireland, to which there can't really be many, if any, direct shipping routes from Malaysia, are singled out for special treatment by being allocated to the same band as Australia, Cambodia and Macao. Books sent surface mailweighing up to 1kg will cost 13 Euros to post, those weighing up to 1.5kg will cost 16 Euros and a 2kg package would cost 17 Euros in postage.

The next most expensive band includes France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and a few other countries where The Penang Bookshelf doesn't yet have customers. Here for surface mail, books weighing up to 1kg will cost 15 Euros in postage, a parcel below 1.5kg will cost 17 Euros and a below 2kg will cost 19 Euros. Believe it or not there's yet another European surface mail band which includes countries like Finland, Norway, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland where the three rates are the same as or more expensive than air mail, whose rates I've mentioned above.

Under the old rates a 1kg parcel would have cost 9 Euros by sea mail and a 2kg parcel 14 Euros. So, where surface mail is an option, the rates have increased as has happened for other parts of the world.

North American customers are the biggest winners in the new set up. Of course like anyone else they can't benefit from the cheaper rates that used to exist for parcels under 1kg, but in the present scheme of things they should be smiling. Airmail packages up to 1kg now cost CA/US$24, up to 1.5kg $28 and a bundle under 2kg will cost $34 for posting by airmail. This compares with rates of $27, $41 and $50 respectively under the old system. Again surface mail rates to North America are either the same or more expensive than the airmail rates. The only country in the whole of the Americas which has the benefit of reasonable sea mail rates is Mexico which for some reason falls into the same band as Australia, Austria, Ireland and Japan.

In terms of The Penang Bookshelf's charging policies, this means that any international postage rates shown on descriptions of some books are no longer relevant. It also means that any offers to send parcels over 2kg free by surface mail to any part of the world are no longer in effect. 

If I was a journalist, I'd be banging on the door of Pos Malaysia to try and get an explanation for some of these anomalies and many more that don't concern The Penang Bookshelf's customers. Of course there's no guarantee that any Pos Malaysia official would be gracious enough open the door to me!

If you are a customer or potential customer of The Penang Bookshelf and have any further questions, I'll do my best to answer them.   

An Update

Of course, the rates announced at the beginning of May, did produce a backlash and so, fairly quietly, Pos Malaysia had a bit of a climbdown a couple of weeks later.

All the confusing grouping of countries into postal zones are still there. So you can still send packages by surface mail to Ireland and to Mexico more cheaply that you can to, say, the United Kingdom or the United States. However instead of making the minmum weight for airmail 1kg, someone has come to the realisation that many parcels sent by air mail are a bit lighter. So there are now rates for 250 gr, 500 gr, 1kg and 1.5 kg as well. Phew! 

Now that's settled down, I thought it might be interesting to compare the new rates to a group of countries to which The Penang Bookshelf posts most freqently. These are airmail rates expressed in US dollars with the pre-change rates in brackets.

Area	To 0.25kg	To 0.5kg	To 1kg	To 1.5 kg	To 2kg
Australasia	$9(7)	$13(10)	$21(15)	$25(21)	$30(26)
Europe	$10(7)	$17(12)	$24(17)	$27(28)	$34(35)
Americas	$10(11)	$17(15)	$24(27)	$27(41)	$34(50)
Singapore	$7(7)	$10(10)	$14(14)	$16(20)	$17(26)

In fact the changes aren't as terrifying as the hullabaloo makes out. Posting by airmail to Australasia is a bit more expensive, to Europe it's the same below 1kg, to the Americas it's cheaper to post more than 1kg and the rates over 1kg have been reduced to Singapore as well.

Surface mail under 2kg still remains a cheaper option for Australia, but not New Zealand and for most mainland European countries.