Inside the robot superhub delivering a glimpse of Royal Mail’s future

The so-called flow room upstairs allows its handful of engineers to orchestrate the routes of its 94 trucks, 24 hours a day, and keep an eye on each individual parcel once it enters the warehouse.

A wall of CCTV screens and live data feeds capture the health of robots and the wider systems, while technicians use walkie-talkie radios to speak to colleagues “on the floor” and resolve any issues that might arise – even illegible addresses on parcels.

Such technology marks a shake-up for Royal Mail that has, until recently, struggled with a lack of automation. Yet it still has a way to go – and competition to fight.

“They have been way behind everyone else because they’ve been historically state-owned, capital-constrained, unionised and a large national bureaucracy,” says Gerald Khoo, a transport analyst at Liberum.

“Royal Mail is evolving, but it’s very much catching up rather than leading. It has always been light and slow, ideally things that will fit through a letterbox. That end of the market is in decline.”

Royal Mail’s dominance of the letter market, enabled by 90,000 posties walking to 31m addresses up and down the country, is not mirrored when it comes to parcels.

Rivals such as Hermes and DHL have been stealing market share in recent years by offering lower prices and deliveries on Sunday or the same day.

The biggest threat, however, remains Amazon’s logistics business which has become the number two player in the UK since launching in 2012.

Royal Mail may take comfort in the fact it is still the leading parcel courier, accounting for just over a third of the market in 2020, compared to 15pc for Amazon, according to data from logistics company Pitney Bowes.

Grant McPherson, chief operating officer, rejects suggestions that Royal Mail has been slow to adapt to the rise of online shopping and parcel delivery.

“I think any company would like to be at the cutting edge of technology and I think we are,” he says. “Doing things sooner? I think this is the right time.”

He describes Amazon, which is also a customer, as “healthy competition”.

“We see some of the great things that they do, we deliver quite a lot of parcels for them because we go to places they don’t go or don’t want to go.”

He adds: “Competition is good, it’s healthy and it spurs us on. We want to be ready for the future, [and] the explosion that is coming in parcels.”