Chairman of the board Guy Buswell has left UK Mail with immediate effect after a profits warning and a major fall in share value in the last week. The company has been struggling with the trend toward parcels away from transactional mail.

Last week the mail company reported a major drop in profits in Q3, and markets reacted with a fall in share prices by 17.5%. Rival operator Royal Mail by comparison showed only a minor fall in revenues and continues to work strongly.

UK Mail had been experiencing difficulties after moving its head office and main hub from Birmingham to Coventry in the last year. This with the general trend away from mail to parcels put the company in operational difficulty. It was reported in late summer that workers at a new hub in Ryton, West Midlands had been having to sort bulky parcels by hand due to a systems breakdown. Of the 52 hubs across the UK, only the main sorting hub in Coventry is fully automated.

In a statement referring to the company’s difficulties, UK Mail said, “It will take longer than originally anticipated to resolve the issues but we expect to achieve this over the next 12 months.” The statement did not give any quote from Buswell, only saying that the founder Peter Kane does “wish him well for the future.”

Buswell is to be replaced in the interim by Mr Kane who moves from non-executive chairman to interim executive chairman.

While UK Mail has taken measures to change direction at the top, rival company DX Delivery is rumoured to be reconsidering its senior management’s continuation in their roles, as like UK Mail it had poor results over the last year too. It seems indeed that only Royal Mail has done well in this segment of the UK market.