Poșta Română owns 0.48% of Romania's lockers as the EU's €2 parcel fee lands

On November 1 the European Union began charging €2 for every item declared on a parcel entering the bloc↗ from outside it ¹⁷. Four days before that, Romania's postal regulator ANCOM published the data of its 2025 market report↗, and read together the two documents deliver a message the Romanian state does not want to hear: the fee prices a parcel flow whose last mile in Romania now runs through private lockers and partner shops, not the counters the state post still owns ².

Temu signed a network the operator spent 2025 closing

On September 2, Temu and Poșta Română signed a memorandum for the platform's Romanian local sellers↗: the state operator handles pickup from merchants, sorting in Romanian logistics centers and last-mile delivery, with handover at home addresses, pickup points, lockers and post offices ³. The deal's value sits in that last hop, where the customer stands.

The regulator's data show the hop moved. Delivery endpoints in Romania shifted from post offices to private lockers and partner shops: Poșta Română closed about 700 offices in 2025↗ and ended the year with roughly 18,200 staff, below 20,000 for the first time in its history ²⁴. Its share of the country's postal units fell from 71% in 2023 to 51% ².

Partner points at shops and petrol stations more than replaced the closed offices, but they are not the state's counters ². The universal-service obligation still requires one staffed point per commune or town through 2029, so the network stays legally alive while the traffic leaves it ⁴.

The money sits in the automated end of the chain

Romania's whole postal market took in 7.3 billion lei in 2025, up 14% ². The parcel segment alone earned almost 6 billion lei of that ². Across roughly 372 million parcels, the average one paid its carrier about 15 lei ².

That money now sits in automated last-mile assets: lockers, sorting centers and delivery fleets, which is where the regulator says sector investment went ². Locker networks grew to 10,730 units last year, and Poșta Română owns 0.48% of them, after 0.04% in 2024 and 0.05% in 2023, so the network grew around the state post rather than through it ². The operator kept the legacy endpoints, 93% of the country's mailboxes and most letter traffic, and with them about 12% of market revenue, third place ².

What the €2 fee adds, and what it stacks on

The handling fee is charged per declared item regardless of the parcel's value; the declarant pays it and cannot get it back, even if the declaration is canceled ¹. It is an EU-level charge applied on the same terms in every member state, collected by customs at clearance, and it stacks on the €3 per-item duty the EU has collected since July 1↗ ⁷⁶.

The platforms saw this coming and are moving fulfilment inside the EU, with Temu targeting most of its European orders from EU warehouses ⁶. A Temu parcel is therefore becoming a domestic Romanian delivery, and on that terrain Sameday, Fan Courier and GLS hold the volume and the lockers ².

The audit and Black Friday will price the state's parcel asset

Economy minister-designate Daniel Zamfir calls Poșta Română profitable but below its potential and has promised an audit before any management decision ⁵. Two things decide whether the state's parcel asset still matches the state's parcel money.

One is the audit's scope: whether it prices the automated last mile or only the counters the operator reports. The other is whether the September memorandum converts into measured Temu volume for Poșta Română before Black Friday, the first high season since the fee went live ³⁵. If the fee is doing its work, the volume it reroutes should show up in a private carrier's locker counts before it shows up in the state post's revenue.