Philatelic Sales By Postal Authorities

Q/ Got any data on Philatelic Sales by Postal Authorities?

It occurs to me that our evergreen fascination with the health of our hobby might benefit from a little hard data.

Yes, the sales at the philatelic units will include mint sheet hoarders, but it will also include new & veteran collectors buying new issues, first day souvenirs, etc.

Yes, trends in the sales at the philatelic units will also reflect a certain ebb'n'flow of customers starting & stopping at new issues dealers, etc, but that can't be helped ... though it certainly can be quibbled over, and where's the fun, after all?

If you've seen any year-to-year philatelic sales data for the various postal authorities worldwide, please post the data (preferably with a source link) in this thread.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

The USPS does not appear to break out philatelic sales. I did find that in 2017 they printed 19 billion stamps and sold 436 million dollars of those by mail, telephone and online.

https://facts.usps.com/wp-content/u..._smaller.pdf

It was easier to find the info in the silly PDF than in their FY reports.

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I would suspect that many of the stamp-using commercial mailing firms order their stamps by mail, telephone and online.

Q/ Is there not an old OIG report about the Kansas City facility? Maybe it has an introduction / background section that would help.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

UpDate: found the report; useless for our purposes.

https://www.linns.com/news/us-stamp...b-sales.html ... Linn's article on FY 2015 sales ... now all we need is another year's data ;)

Interesting subject but your not going to get the truthful story about what goes on with the various Philatelic Sales Dept. from countries around the world .

Q/ How can it be that the various national mints release coin sales data, but the national postal authorities do not release stamp sales data?

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

IKEY-----They don't release data because -----They wholesale stamps to various stamp dealers around the world at a discounted price but keep it quiet so as not to hurt their retail and subscribtion customers .

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I don't see why they need release data that is so granular that you can pick-out the discounts for foreign agents, but ...

https://www.linns.com/news/us-stamp...-agents.html ... Linn's 20171207 USPS severing ties with 35 overseas sales agents

Q/ Did they resume price-discounted consignment selling to these agents?


Q/ If they charged the foreign agents full price for the stamps, and then paid the foreign agents their discount/commission out of the USPS marketing budget(*), would that help?

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

(*) any similarity to how non-existent commissions on Foreign Military Sales do not get paid is entirely coincidental

Read the above article ------[Always looking for the truth buried in the article ] My guess is that one of those overseas agents was selling huge quanities of the overseas discounted postage back into the U.S. for a quick profit .

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I re-read the whole article, and whatever you saw between the lines, uh, stayed there.

Who would they be selling "huge quantities" of postage to?

If commercial mailers are buying the stamps, limiting the sale of large coils would solve the problem.

If US-based new issues dealers & collectors are buying "huge quantities", hurray!

Since the contract already required the overseas re-sellers to collect VAT, it seems it would be simple enough to audit them once every three years, as there would be no VAT collected on 'exports' to the US.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey