Mail Delivery Services

Patrick Donahoe, the Postmaster General of USPS, has recently announced that the USPS will be taking several drastic measures in order to cut costs, due to it's ever increasing deficit. This news has peaked my interest regarding mail delivery services such as USPS, UPS, FedEx, and DHL, specifically the delivery of documents (not packages).

According to Porter's Five Force model, industries include five forces: Barriers to Entry, Buyer Power, Supplier Power, Rivalries, and Substitutes. I'm going to briefly discuss a few of these forces with regards to the mail delivery service industry.

Barriers to Entry
Creating a successful mail delivery service requires having a very large network of offices and transportation. This requires a tremendous amount of capital for property and equipment. Another barrier to entry is how well known the current mail delivery service companies are. Everyone knows who they are and most people already have an allegiance to one in particular.
You're going to need some serious moolah to make it into this industry with its barriers to entry.

Rivalries
As I just mentioned, there are already quite a few large, well-established mail delivery services available to consumers. My family uses FedEx for most of its delivery needs. I don't really seeing us switching services, especially to a small, unknown company, unless something drastic happened.
Danger to new entrants.

Substitutes
To me, this is definitely the most interesting force in this industry. One of the reasons that USPS is struggling so much is because people have stopped mailing things. USPS' mail volume has decreased by 50% over the past decade. Now I can't be sure, but I would assume that one of the main reasons that mail volume has decreased so drastically is because of available substitutes. Fewer people feel the need to send physical copies of letters and other documents because of the increased acceptance of digital document formats and the Internet. Now with more and more people switching to digital information exchange, not even government subsidies and bailouts can save them unless drastic changes are made.
In other words, the substitutes are not in favor of this industry.

Source: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2011/09/16/ups-vs-usps-mail-delivery-just-got-more-interesting/