Newsflow wins papers deals
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• After weeks of speculation, the National Freight Consortium's newspaper distribution company, Newsflow, has finally tied up contracts to deliver by road more than 70% of Britain's daily and Sunday papers.
Newsflow, which already distributes the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror, Sunday Sport and People, announced this week that it has confirmed contracts with the Daily Express, Sunday Express, Daily Star, Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, The Guardian and Financial Times.
On 6 June Newsflow will begin to deliver the Daily Mail, the Mail on Sunday and the northern distribution of The Guardian to 92 wholesalers throughout Britain and the remaining new titles will hit the road on 11July, including southern distribution of The Guardian.
Though Newsflow will not disclose the value of its new contracts, the company was understandably bullish about its new-found dominance of the newspaper distribution market. It has fought back strongly from the disastrous closure of Robert Maxwell's London Daily News which left Newsflow with a large fleet of vans and nothing to transport.
The company says that its success is largley due to a series of monitoring surveys it has undertaken with wholesalers like W H Smith, to find out how reliable their deliveries have been day to day.
Newsflow says it is now gunning for the remaining Fleet Street titles, The Observer, the Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph and The Independent, which have still not decided what to do in the wake of British Rail's announcement last week that it is pulling out of the newspaper distribution business altogether.
Rival carrier TNT Newsfast is left with Rupert Murdoch's News International titles, The Sun, The Times, Sunday Times, The News of the World and Today, despite its early lead in revolutionising the way that UK's newspapers are delivered to Britain's breakfast tables.
Newsflow reckons that the new contracts will: O Boost its workforce to 570; O Increase turnover to £18 million;
LI Generate a fleet of 21 drawbar units, 127 17-tonne rigid curtainsiders and 110 7.5-tonne and 10-tonne rigid curtainsiders.
The company now says that it will be seeking to distribute major regional daily newspapers and major national magazine titles. It is also looking at expanding Newsflow's distribution technique abroad.