While sending a pallet has never been more affordable the same can’t be said if you are sending an actual pallet network on its final journey.
UK Pallets, officially recorded as no more by parent company UK Mail in its April results, ultimately cost more than £10m to wind up (much tied up in writing down the value of the asset, as previously covered on Motortransport.co.uk).
Having taken an impairment charge of £7.3m in regards goodwill from the original purchase of UK Pallets (in 2003) in November of last year, UK Mail recognised the whole amount to the tune of £7.9m in the financial year ended 31 March 2015 (as by then it had announced the closure of the business).
However, there was a further £1.1m impairment charge relating to the “write-off of capitalised software development costs” to come and redundancy pay-outs and contract termination costs for the network, which stopped trading at the end of March, added another £1.4m to the bill.
All this meant the business delivered a parting gift of a £10.8m loss after tax for UK Mail in the year ended 31 March 2015. This compared to a profit after tax of £700,000 at UK Pallets a year earlier.
It caused UK Mail to stumble, although it should be back into its stride soon enough.
Perhaps the most inexplicable part of all this though is that UK Pallets' slow, painful death was played out against the backdrop of a booming pallet network market – 2014 was another record in terms of volume – proving sadly that the completion was simply too much.