Few European stocks have polarized investors quite like InPost. Since its 2021 IPO on Euronext Amsterdam, the Polish parcel-locker pioneer has seen its share price soar, crash, and then claw its way back as the market tries to decide what, exactly, it’s looking at. Is this a “one-country wonder” that struck gold in Poland and is now overreaching abroad? Or is it a quietly compounding logistics platform whose moat is only beginning to show outside its home market?
The past year has been a reality check. The stock rallied hard in early 2024 on the promise of accelerating international volumes, only to cool again as investors questioned whether profitability in France and the UK would ever resemble the Polish template. At the same time, management has been walking a tightrope: expanding across Europe while trying to prove that the model’s unit economics travel well beyond Warsaw. The company’s H1 2025 results show both progress and friction – revenue still rising double digits, margins stabilizing, but free cash flow weighed down by ongoing investment.
And yet, dig below the noise, and the story looks more intriguing than ever!
More than half of InPost’s business now comes from outside Poland. Locker utilization in the UK and France is hitting inflection points. EBITDA per parcel in mature markets keeps climbing, even as competition intensifies. The business remains misunderstood because it doesn’t fit cleanly into traditional boxes: it’s capital-heavy but scalable, infrastructure-driven but tech-enabled, transactional but habit-forming.
To me, InPost is the most “Peter Lynch-style” stock I’ve researched in quite a while. It’s a rather boring business at first glance – one that many investors might reject too quickly because it lacks an exciting narrative to wrap around it. Yet that’s precisely what makes it interesting. This is a company with a simple, easy-to-grasp model, predictable cash flows, and a structure that’s counter-positioned to incumbents weighed down by legacy courier operations. It’s a fast grower hiding in plain sight, operating in a space most investors would never call glamorous but that quietly compounds volume, habit, and efficiency year after year.
Lynch famously divided stocks into six categories: Slow Growers, Stalwarts, Fast Growers, Cyclicals, Turnarounds, and Asset Plays. InPost clearly sits in the Fast Grower bucket – small enough to be nimble, growing earnings north of 35–40%, and still with a long runway ahead. On a PEG basis, the stock looks strikingly attractive: strong double-digit growth with a multiple that hasn’t yet caught up to its potential. It’s the kind of setup Lynch loved – a “boring” business delivering extraordinary numbers, misunderstood simply because it’s not telling a sexy story.
In this deep dive, I’ll unpack why InPost’s economics are far more powerful than they appear on the surface – and why the stock’s volatility may be masking one of Europe’s most compelling compounders in the making. We’ll explore the core mechanics of the business model, how its competitive advantage really works (and where it might break), the quality of management and capital allocation, the leverage debate, and what the current market skepticism is getting wrong.
For investors willing to look beyond short-term cash-flow optics, InPost offers an interesting proposition: a company spending heavily today to own the infrastructure of how Europe shops tomorrow, and thereby earning very attractive returns on incremental investments that do not show in backward-looking numbers yet.
The question isn’t whether lockers – otherwise known as Automated Parcel Machines (APMs) – make sense. Somewhat counterintuitively, they do! It’s whether InPost can stay just far enough ahead of everyone else to make that advantage permanent.
Here’s what you’ll find inside this 28,000-word deep dive:
The 90-second “Bam Bam Bam Bam Bam” test – how the stock can be pitched in under two minutes, and what makes it intriguing right now.
Under the hood of the machine – how InPost actually makes money per parcel, why its economics look so different from a typical courier, and how those economics shift as lockers fill up.
Europe’s misunderstood logistics war – what competitors like Amazon, Royal Mail, and La Poste are doing, and why InPost is winning on the battlefield.
Why habit matters more than technology – the psychology of consumers who keep choosing lockers and how behavior – not pricing – locks in market share; and how InPost increases stickiness.
A candid look at the moat – which advantages are structural and which might be illusions; how fast the gap could close if incumbents finally get serious.
Management under the microscope – the double-edged sword of founder leadership under Rafał Brzoska, capital allocation discipline, and what past mistakes & past acquisitions (including Yodel) reveal about judgment under pressure.
Balance sheet realism – separating genuine financial risk from the optics of expansion; what “moderate leverage” really means when capex slows.
The Allegro dispute decoded – how a long-term contract indexed to inflation turned a key customer into a competitor, and why that conflict might ultimately make InPost stronger.
Understanding APMs vs. PUDOs – why the distinction defines InPost’s strategy, the economics of both models, and how the transition to lockers unlocks the Polish-level profitability abroad.
A TAM analysis – a bottom-up look at the total addressable market across Europe, why parcel density and consumer behavior still give InPost a decade-long runway, and how the “lockerable universe” keeps expanding driven by four key structural tailwinds.
New products and innovations – how InPost is quietly layering software, convenience features, and value-added services (returns, payments, C2C) on top of its physical network.
The inversion exercise – a devil’s-advocate rundown of the most convincing bear cases and what conditions would have to align for them to come true.
Hidden fragilities
The valuation groundwork – what kind of growth I’m underwriting, how temporary fear has created mispricing, why the setup might resemble the early innings of other network-driven compounders, plus my valuation approach built on Poland’s mature economics alone, an 8x look-through multiple on group earnings, and a full scenario analysis mapping potential upside and downside paths.
The meta-lesson – what this case teaches about recognizing “moving moats,” balancing capital intensity with operating leverage, and keeping a probabilistic mindset in investing.
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Let’s start with the Bam Bam Bam Bam Bam pitch. Bill Miller used to say that if you can’t distill the essence of your idea into 90 seconds, you probably don’t understand it well enough. Portfolio managers, he argued, don’t have the patience for fluff – they want five quick, compelling “bams” that get straight to why the idea matters.
So, if I were pitching InPost in that Lynch-style, egg-timer way, here’s how it would sound:
BAM: InPost is the clear market leader in out-of-home parcel delivery in Poland and is now also rapidly (and successfully) scaling across Europe, where the opportunity is massive (“France, Italy, Spain, combined, is another 8x bigger market opportunity than Poland“). Both customers and merchants love InPost’s service. And it’s a network effects story hiding in plain sight – the denser the locker network, the higher the convenience, the stronger the moat.
A quickly growing network
BAM: The business is structurally advantaged: parcel lockers are more efficient(couriers operating within an APM network deliver up to ten times as many parcels as those performing traditional home deliveries), thus cheaper to operate (roughly 20-30% cheaper than what to-door incumbents offer), more reliable, and more environmentally friendly than doorstep delivery. That translates into gross margins (64% for InPost’s APM business in Poland in FY24; 44% on group level) that are more than double those of traditional courier models – and those margins have proven remarkably resilient even amid European macro headwinds.
BAM: Growth outside Poland – especially in France and the UK – is reaching a turning point. After years of investment, volumes and utilization are inflecting upward, and InPost is moving from loss-making expansion to operating leverage.
BAM: The market still prices InPost as if it were a Polish parcel operator with foreign ambitions, not as a European infrastructure play that could dominate the next decade of e-commerce logistics. The valuation reflects skepticism about profitability abroad that’s increasingly disconnected from the improving data.
BAM: The capital structure is improving, the company generates solid free cash flow, and management is now prioritizing returns on invested capital over sheer footprint expansion. The setup is a rare mix of scale, efficiency, and underappreciated optionality.
If I had to summarize the thesis in one line: the market underestimates how powerful InPost’s network economics are once scale is reached outside Poland – and how quickly those economics are now taking hold.
Why this stock now? Because the stock is down roughly 45% from its previous high, and we’re at a moment where the operating leverage from past investments is beginning to surface in the numbers, while sentiment is still anchored in old narratives of capex intensity and regional uncertainty. That disconnect creates a compelling window – one that won’t stay open once the financials fully reflect the cross-market economics already in motion.
Credits where credits are due:
I also want to give credit where it’s due. Jake Barfield deserves a mention again – in a private discussion we had on Timee (my last write-up, which itself was inspired by his analysis), he brought up InPost as an example of how network activity is a critical metric to track and assess a network’s true strength. That idea stuck with me, since it applies equally well to both InPost and Timee. So, in true Pabrai fashion, I decided to be a “shameless cloner” and dig in – the more I looked, the more the opportunity excited me. I also want to thank the investors at Granular Capital, whose excellent 2024 deep dive (read it here) on the company helped me better grasp several of the finer nuances of the business. Finally, Wolf of Harcourt Street also put out a great update on the recent quarterly results.
Disclaimer: I own InPost shares. The analysis presented in this blog may be flawed and/or critical information may have been overlooked. The content provided should be considered an educational resource and should not be construed as individualized investment advice, nor as a recommendation to buy or sell specific securities. I may own some of the securities discussed. The stocks, funds, and assets discussed are examples only and may not be appropriate for your individual circumstances. It is the responsibility of the reader to do their own due diligence before investing in any index fund, ETF, asset, or stock mentioned or before making any sell decisions. Also double-check if the comments made are accurate. You should always consult with a financial advisor before purchasing a specific stock and making decisions regarding your portfolio.
One More Thing Before We Start … Listen on the Go!
I realize my deep dives truly go deep—they’re dense, detailed, and designed to be studied, not skimmed. Reading and digesting everything here is a proper commitment, and I appreciate everyone who takes the time to do so. But if you prefer a more convenient way to follow along, remember that you can listen to this piece directly in the Substack app. Every post is available in audio form, so you can catch up while commuting, walking, or doing anything else that doesn’t involve staring at a screen.
Part 1 – Understanding the Business
Product: What exactly does InPost sell?
At its core, InPost doesn’t sell goods at all – it sells convenience, efficiency, and time. The company’s flagship product is its automated parcel machine (APM) network – effectively a standalone unit consisting of individual compartments (see image below) –, which allows consumers to send, receive, or return parcels at any hour of the day (24/7) without having to wait at home for a courier.
It’s a logistics infrastructure play disguised as a consumer service. Unlike traditional couriers who rely on doorstep deliveries, InPost’s model is built around out-of-home (OOH) delivery – a structural shift in how e-commerce parcels move from merchants to customers. Basically, the end-consumer is doing last-mile delivery himself; and they can also do returns via the APMs.
What’s important to understand is that InPost operates a fully integrated, end-to-end logistics network rather than “only” managing locker points or pickup shops. Beyond its extensive network of APMs and PUDOs (Pick-Up, Drop-Off points), the company owns and operates the entire supporting infrastructure – distribution centers, regional hubs, local depots, fleets of vehicles, and drivers – that make seamless parcel movement possible.
This vertical integration allows InPost to control quality, efficiency, and speed across every step of the delivery chain, from parcel induction to final drop-off. It also creates significant cost advantages and operational flexibility, as the company doesn’t rely on third-party carriers for key stages of the process.
A Win-Win-Win Proposition
What makes InPost’s model so powerful is that it doesn’t just work for end customers or merchants – it creates a genuine win-win-win across the ecosystem, including property owners (and arguably even society as a whole due to the environmental benefits).
Let’s start with the customers: At first glance, you may think out-of-home deliveries provide an inferior value proposition. But that’s not quite accurate! I’d just you take a moment and step back to think about this …
Let me walk you through the entire customer experience, which is really quite simple: an online shopper selects “InPost locker” at checkout, receives a notification (via email or in the app) when the parcel arrives, and picks it up from a nearby locker using a QR code or app. It’s often the faster (if the network is established, which takes time to build, as to be discussed) AND cheaper option for customers (if the merchant passes the delivery cost on to customers).
The AI-generated table above shows approximate consumer prices for a “standard parcel” (mid-size / 1 kg-ish).
APMs offer the benefit of no waiting around for couriers, no pick up from the neighbors you don’t like, no scheduling conflicts, and no awkward drop-offs during work or online meetings (keep in mind that usually delivery windows are VERY wide, and if I just consider my wife as a benchmark here (don’t tell here), she is regularly expecting multiple parcels a day – you can simply pick up or send parcels whenever it suits you, often when you’re on your way to grocery shopping, on a walk, or when you’re outside anyway.
For merchants and logistics partners (as of Q1, 55,000 merchants), this means fewer failed delivery attempts (in fact, almost none), fewer incidents of theft (a somewhat unrelated fact: 54% of Americans say they’ve had a package swiped) or damaged parcels (I just received a damaged one yesterday via to-door delivery), higher delivery density, and dramatically lower last-mile costs.
“One driver during eight-hour shift visiting around 12 different locations with 12 machines may deploy up to 1200 parcels during eight-hour shift. Whereas normally a driver may deliver 60 to 75 parcels in traditional door-to-door way. […]
One machine, just to give you a comparison, a visual comparison, one machine in Warsaw, on a daily basis, saves as much CO2 as 1200 years old trees during the whole year. One day, 12 trees a year. Because people are passing by or going by walk, picking up their parcel, instead of having, you know, 12 or 15 vans delivering the same number of parcels directly to your home.” – From Quality Investing: InPost // Rafał Brzoska, 14. May 2024
And as discussed, for consumers, it means speed and flexibility. That combination of lower cost and higher convenience is what gives the product its edge – it’s cheaper to operate and better to use.
Finally, not only do customers and merchants benefit (faster & cheaper deliveries), no InPost’s APM network also delivers tangible value to the property owners hosting its lockers. These partners – often convenience store operators, transport hubs, or residential complexes – gain an incremental stream of rental income from space they already control, while simultaneously enhancing the attractiveness of their location for visitors. The presence of a frequently used APM drives higher foot traffic, which directly benefits nearby businesses. The investors of Granular Capital found out that up to 10% of locker visits result in additional in-store purchases, meaning that property owners/landlords naturally prefer to lease space to the operator with the highest utilisation. Because InPost’s lockers typically generate several times more footfall than competitors, the economic gap becomes self-reinforcing: a rival would have to pay many times more “rent per parcel” to compensate for the lower incremental profit their locker generates. In other words, InPost’s density advantage doesn’t just lower its own unit costs – it also makes it the most attractive and economically rational partner for property owners.
So in sum, customers get faster, cheaper, and more flexible parcel delivery; merchants gain a reliable, scalable logistics partner that improves conversion and reduces last-mile costs; and property owners hosting lockers benefit from an additional, low-maintenance revenue stream and higher foot traffic to their sites. This alignment of incentives reinforces network effects on all sides, strengthening InPost’s moat as the network scales.
Building a Network, One Locker at a Time
What makes InPost’s product truly differentiated is its network density. In Poland, where the company started, parcel lockers are nearly ubiquitous – more than 26,000 automated parcel machines (APM) locations cover the country, with roughly 70% of Poles living within a 7-minute walk of one. InPosts is the clear leader in terms of capacity in Poland:
The total APM network encompasses more than 50,000 APMs as of Q2 and includes roughly 35,000 PUDOs (again, PUDO stands for Pick-Up, Drop-Off point, which is a human-staffed partner location) on top of the APM network.
“The different degrees of development can best be understood by looking at the number of OOH points per 10,000 residents. This is still indeed much higher in Eastern Europe and Scandinavia (around 15 in Poland and the Czech Republic; around 16 in Finland) than in Western European countries (around 8 in Germany and around 9 France), but growth is ubiquitous.“ - McKinsey (2024)
That saturation is nearly impossible for competitors to replicate, and it’s the backbone of the company’s moat (to be discussed in more detail further below).
The service feels premium because of its reliability and coverage (“it just works” - similar to Netflix in a way).
This places InPost squarely in the mid-tier segment of logistics – affordable enough for budget-conscious merchants, yet efficient and reliable enough to serve premium e-commerce players who can’t afford to compromise on customer experience. It sits in that sweet spot between cost and quality that few operators manage to occupy for long. At the lower end of the market, InPost’s just-in-time network is almost too good a fit. For example, with low delivery expectations among AliExpress customers, a hyper-efficient and convenience-led network like InPost’s is, in many ways, an “overkill solution.” These buyers value price over speed, and the economics of their cross-border shipments don’t demand (or reward) rapid fulfillment. That’s why the threat of Alibaba or AliExpress encroaching meaningfully on InPost’s home turf is often misunderstood.
Beyond lockers, InPost also operates courier and to-door delivery options – mainly as a complement for merchants who want hybrid fulfillment. However, these are strategically secondary. The locker network is the profit engine and main focus, and nearly all innovation and capital allocation revolve around strengthening and expanding that ecosystem.
Understanding the Difference Between APMs & PUDOs – and Why It Matters!
When investors talk about InPost’s expansion, the discussion often gets muddled by jargon: PUDOs, APMs, OOH, hybrid networks. Yet understanding the difference between Automated Parcel Machines (APMs) and Pick-Up Drop-Off points (PUDOs) in particular is central to grasping InPost’s strategy going forward – and its competitive edge.
The distinction isn’t just operational. It defines the company’s long-term profitability, scalability, and customer stickiness.
PUDOs are the legacy format of out-of-home delivery. They’re hosted inside partner shops – corner stores, kiosks, post offices – where customers collect or return parcels over the counter. PUDOs are cheap to set up but expensive to maintain. Each can only handle 50–100 parcels at a time, has limited opening hours, and depends heavily on the quality and reliability of individual shop owners. As one industry insider put it, managing a fragmented network of PUDOs means “thousands of feet on the street” and constant churn among mom-and-pop locations. The operational friction adds up: compliance issues, inconsistent service levels, and slower parcel turnover. Average parcel dwell time in a PUDO is around 1.5x longer than in an APM, meaning slower utilization and more working capital tied up in the system.
“Convenience stores aren’t that convenient for parcel collection, and particularly not during the pandemic.“ - David Kerstens, an analyst with Jefferies International
By contrast, APMs are InPost’s signature product – self-service lockers accessible 24/7, scalable through modular design. Each machine can hold 200+ parcels and be expanded by adding columns as volume grows.
“Unlike a warehouse or a pick-up-drop-off (PUDO) location, the size and therefore capacity of an APM can dynamically increase as demand grows - the APMs are modular and new columns of lockers can be added with relative ease. […] [In Poland] InPost has 1,000s of machines that have 200+ lockers.“ - Granular Capital Ltd. InPost Write-Up (2024)
For drivers, APMs are a logistics dream: a single stop can offload hundreds of parcels, and each route can include 7–10 APMs per day, translating to up to 1,000 parcels per driver. That’s an order of magnitude higher than a typical PUDO route. This scale efficiency compounds across two of the company’s largest cost centers – labor and transport – creating structural operating leverage that competitors without APM expertise simply can’t replicate.
From the consumer’s perspective, the difference is equally stark. A parcel pickup at a PUDO can involve waiting in line, limited opening hours, and sometimes disorganized backroom storage. By contrast, an APM pickup takes around 30 seconds, requires no staff interaction, and can be done anytime. That frictionless experience has made lockers the preferred choice wherever InPost operates, with satisfaction scores consistently above 90%. As Rafal Brzoska often emphasizes, “Our North Star is 100% APMs in out-of-home delivery… it’s not about the locker itself—it’s about the ecosystem that makes the locker experience seamless.”
“But clearly, we are working today in all those international markets with a legacy mixture PUDO business through sort of asset-light strategy and acquisition. And clearly, there’s also a unit economic advantage of converting from a legacy PUDO parcel rate to an APM rate where we don’t have that cost apart from, obviously, the CapEx and then we sweat that asset.“ - Q2 25 Call
“[…] what we’re really satisfied with is the flow rate to APMs that we have observed. In Q1 ‘25, almost 40% of all parcels were delivered to APMs. That’s compared to over 20% a year ago and 11% 2 years ago. That’s significant progress as we observed the parcels going to APMs as we continue to automate from our out-of-home network converting from PUDO to APM.“ - Q1 25 Call
“Q: I’m aware that PUDOs are less popular amongst online buyers than APMs if you look at MPS, but perhaps you can shed some more light on it. So Michael will comment the Eurozone dynamics, but I will comment generally.
A: Of course, for us in North Star is 100% of APMs in out-of-home. This solution provides best-in-class customer experience, 24/7 access to the service, localization, but also extraordinary good efficiency, operating leverage, which then translates into profitability. And I think this is the DNA of the company. Still even in Poland, we keep some PUDO points mostly for the locations where we cannot expand, extend our lockers, let’s say, in city centers. But -- this is our way. We know how to do it. We know how to transform it. And also looking at the consumer adoption on the new markets we developed from scratch, we see consumer preferences, and it’s hard to discuss with that. The preference is here, and it’s not about lockers itself. It’s all about the ecosystem we’ve built, giving our end users the confidence that this is the best solution, matching their expectations. […]
In fact, as we’ve gone through that journey and because our volume increased, we have actually increased initially some of the PUDO coverage to compensate for that volume. That was a good problem because clearly, our volume grew as we really went to market and revitalized the Mondial Relay offer. […] As Rafal said, we will keep PUDOs, right? North Star will be 100% APM, but there is a pragmatic reality in certain locations. We will still need PUDO coverage for one, because we can’t find a locker location for a variety of potential structural reasons or we need overflow capacity at a certain time of year that we feel that the PUDO can help us serve for that particular period. But again, that should be the less than the majority of what we’re really servicing through APMs.“ - Q1 25 Call
InPost’s current footprint still includes a mix of both. That’s by design, not weakness. In international markets such as France and the UK, where InPost inherited legacy PUDO networks through acquisitions like Mondial Relay and Yodel, the company uses PUDOs as a transitional bridge – a fast way to build coverage and brand familiarity before densifying with lockers. As utilization rises, management systematically converts PUDO volumes into APM flows. In Q1 2025, nearly 40% of all parcels in international markets were already delivered to APMs, up from 20% a year earlier and just 11% two years ago.
Strategically, this migration from PUDO to APM is at the core of InPost’s international playbook. It’s how the company turns what initially looks like a low-margin, asset-light entry model into a high-margin, asset-heavy network that compounds efficiency over time. The process mirrors how Poland evolved: start with reach, build habit, then optimize with density and automation.
Just to provide a personal anecdote to illustrate how hard it is to change consumer habits: when we moved to a new apartment last December, a DHL-operated APM was installed right across the street – a two-minute walk at most. A friend even pitched me on the benefits of using it, and intellectually, I completely understand them. Yet, I haven’t used it once. It’s a good reminder that behavior rarely shifts overnight. As Buffett once put it, “The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.” The same dynamic plays out with the adoption of new consumer technologies like self-checkout terminals in grocery stores – change does come, but it comes slowly, and only once social norms and routines catch up.
Internationally, for InPost, every conversion from a PUDO parcel to an APM parcel isn’t just a small operational gain – it’s a step closer to recreating the Polish economics abroad. The transition takes patience and capital, but the reward is clear: once lockers dominate, the business becomes self-reinforcing – higher utilization, lower variable cost per parcel, and a customer experience that’s almost impossible for incumbents to match.
“In terms of your question more strategically on expansion and PUDOs versus APMs, look, we don’t disclose individual numbers on those different streams, but it’s obvious that the efficiency of delivering a PUDO network versus an APM network is much more to the favor of an APM network.“ - Q4 24 Call
“Of course, it depends on the density of the APM network and utilization of the APMs, but we’ve proven in many markets that we know how to manage that. As Rafal said, it’s not just about putting APMs in place. It’s the expertise on how to run them, which makes a difference. On top of that, PUDOs also have separate fees you need to pay. So obviously, lower efficiency in the amount of parcels you can deliver logically to the PUDOS versus APM and the fees you need to pay make APMs clearly the preferred vehicle to go to and also from a profitability point of view. And therefore, also, there’s been a couple of articles on that. It’s clearly also for us that, when you look at the amount of touch points for the consumer, we will be building up APMs and you will see PUDO touch points going down over time because that is both from a consumer experience point of view, a merchant quality point of view and from a profitability point of view, the right way to go.“ - Q4 24 Call
New Products & Innovation
In terms of new products, InPost continues to evolve its ecosystem rather than branching into unrelated areas. Recent developments include returns and reverse logistics integrations (especially with major fashion retailers), EV-powered micro-depots that improve sustainability, and mobile app enhancements that increase customer stickiness through loyalty features and parcel tracking (14.6m InPost mobile app users as of Q2 (“a number that surpasses the number of households in Poland“), 3.2m Mondial Relay app downloads as of Q4, and 1.9m InPost app downloads in the UK as of Q4).
Some of the benefits of using the app include:
Contactless parcel collection – users can open locker compartments directly via Bluetooth without touching a screen, enhancing convenience and hygiene.
Real-time tracking – provides detailed shipment status updates and notifications for both senders and recipients.
Integrated shipment management – users can create, pay for, and send parcels directly through the app, without needing a printer or physical label.
Label-less returns – simplifies the returns process by generating QR codes for scanning at lockers or partner points.
APM locator and navigation – helps users quickly find nearby parcel lockers (APMs) or PUDO points with availability information.
Digital receipts and delivery history – stores all shipment and return data in one place for easy access.
Push notifications and reminders – ensures users never miss collection or return deadlines.
Loyalty and rewards integration – connects to InPost’s loyalty program (“InCoins”), allowing users to redeem or donate points directly in-app.
The company also experiments with advertising and data-driven services built around its app and locker network – small now, but indicative of long-term optionality beyond parcel delivery itself.
Let’s take a closer look at some of the innovations. As mentioned, InPost offers a printless/label-less returns option that allows customers to send back parcels without needing to print a return label. Instead, shoppers simply generate a QR code through the retailer’s app or website, scan it at any InPost locker, and drop the parcel into an available compartment. The system automatically links the return to the right merchant and handles the rest. This feature may sound small, but it perfectly captures InPost’s customer-centric and innovation-driven culture. By removing one of the most annoying frictions in e-commerce returns – the need for a printer – it streamlines the entire experience and appeals to modern, mobile-first consumers. It’s a good example of how InPost continuously uses technology and data to identify real-world pain points and simplify the logistics journey, reinforcing its brand as a convenient, digital-first, and environmentally conscious alternative to traditional postal services.
“And the same way it works with shipments. If you want to return some goods, you don’t need to go typically to the post office to ship it. You go to the nearest locker and you can ship the parcel directly in the machine within 10 seconds, even without having any label on it, because everything is label-less. End consumer centricity is the DNA of the company. We have extraordinary NPS, more than 80 points right now, and we measure that every single quarter with third-party serving agency. And they literally give us the guidance as well, what people expect, what are the new channels we may deliver even better service.
And that was, for instance, thanks to those surveys, we noticed that the label, printing out the label for the return is a hassle because people are using less and less printers at home. So we have invented, you know, a special functionality in our mobile app. By the way, our mobile app is in our home market right now, the most often used mobile app among 12 million users.” – From Quality Investing: InPost // Rafał Brzoska, 14. May 2024
UK Market Data
Another example is InPost Pay – I’ll simply attach some key quotes from management and the most recent slide deck on the progress that is being made:
“Inpostpay already has almost 8 million registered users and partnerships with over 1,600 merchants that already see a 30% plus increase in their checkout conversions.“ - Q4 24 Call
“I’m happy founder and shareholder of the company. But it’s led by a great, continuously working on the innovations. And our recent innovation, InPost Pay, it’s like Apple Pay, you most probably know, but including immediate checkout with delivery. You don’t need to log in. You don’t need to create your own profile on the website of the merchant. You can shop as a guest, and you just confirm the transaction in InPost mobile app. All your credentials, your cart details are in the mobile app. You don’t share it with multiple merchants. We have more and more data leakages right now, and people’s personal data you can buy everywhere. Here, it’s very secure. It’s just once left in our mobile app, and you can shop online on multiple of merchants’ websites without any hassle, and it takes you literally five seconds to close the transaction. So we provide extraordinary safety linked with extraordinary quality of the service and speed of finalizing the purchasing. And moreover, it’s always linked to your most preferred option of delivery, which is our InPost Loca. And this is another barrier to entry for the others. How to break such a wall, how to break such a relationship when you left some of your personal data to me. Why you want to share it with the others if that solution works? And this is all about the DNA of the company that continuously when we think about new services, we think in a way what we can do better or what we can create new, what’s not existing yet on the market. And that’s how the company is led and how the company develops their new services, how we strengthen our value proposition for end consumer, but also for the merchants.” – From Quality Investing: InPost // Rafał Brzoska, 14. May 2024
Further examples include the InPost Loyalty Programme, which “rewards regular customers for their continued use of InPost services” and already has 12.4 million users; …
“We’ve received a lot of positive feedback, and we plan to roll out loyalty program to other markets, too.“ - Q4 24 Call
“[…] the loyalty program we enrolled is the most successful loyalty program ever enrolled in Poland.“ - Q4 24 Call
… robotic solutions to optimize warehouse efficiencies …
… and similar initiatives; …
“By continually redeveloping and refining their operations, InPost has driven step-change improvements in efficiency. For example, initially, parcels were collected from APMs and taken to local depots and then sent on to sorting hubs where they were redistributed overnight and sent back to depots to be placed in APMs in the morning. Today, depots can sort so that where it is more efficient, parcels move from depot to depot and never have to go to a sorting hub. This significantly reduces the miles travelled by each parcel and greatly increases the efficiency of the operation.” - Granular Capital Ltd. InPost Write-Up (2024)
… or deploying more energy-efficient APMs, consuming 40% less energy.
Finally, this is another little anecdote from the Q2 2025 call, highlighting how InPost is embedding itself deeper into local communities and turning everyday logistics infrastructure into something socially meaningful:
“And one of recent example is our AED initiative. We’ve started deploying defibrillators next to our lockers and users can donate their loyalty points to help fund that. In just 1 month, users contributed over 100 million InCoins to support this life-saving effort. Innovations like this strengthens our ecosystem, deepens customer loyalty and captures more parcel growth. And this is just the beginning.”
Unit Economics
The most important unit of analysis is indeed one parcel delivery. The majority of revenue InPost generates is from the fees it charges merchants for delivery through its network, which the merchants may decide to pass on to consumers (directly or indirectly).
“Services are provided to customers through a “pay-as-you-go” model in accordance with standard price lists […]“
Prices per parcel differ based on the delivery method, and the size and weight of the parcels. Pricing is typically reviewed on an annual basis.
InPost also offers subscriptions, which come with a certain number of credits for parcel deliveries based on 1-2-year contracts:
“For subscription contracts, the customer pays an agreed fixed monthly fee for deliveries of a defined number of parcels per month. The performance obligation under the subscription contract – delivery of a parcel – becomes binding once delivery is requested by the customer. Unused deliveries (breakage) do not roll forward to the next month, and, therefore, the Group recognises the breakage amount as revenue at month-end.“
So the key elements of a per-unit economics analysis include:
the revenue per parcel (which varies by route and market) and
the cost per parcel (operating cost to transport and deliver that parcel through either a locker or courier).
For InPost, cost per parcel tends to decline as volumes increase, due to density and scale.
“While revenue per parcel grew 1%, adjusted EBITDA per parcel increased 6%, even as we continue to expand the network ahead of volumes.“ Q2 25 Call
In its mature Polish network, the cost to handle an additional parcel is very low – once lockers are in place and routes are optimized, delivering more parcels mostly adds variable costs like a bit of labor and vehicle fuel, but not much overhead. This is evident in the company’s data: Poland’s cost per parcel has been managed down over time, contributing to the nowadays established high margins. InPost’s management noted that in Poland, they achieved a -2% YoY reduction in cost-per-parcel in a recent quarter through efficiency gains. On a longer-term basis, cost-per-parcel even declined by more than 40%!
In short, this isn’t a company competing on price in a commoditized space. It’s competing on infrastructure quality, speed, reliability, convenience, and data, and its “product” – the dense network of lockers – becomes more valuable with every new location added, and each APM throws off more profit per parcel as the utilization rate increases. Each locker installed isn’t just a delivery point; it’s a micro-node in a growing web of European e-commerce efficiency.
More on Business Operations & Economics
InPost’s story started in Poland, where a small local logistics player – founded in 1999 – made an early bet on something few others believed in: out-of-home delivery through automated parcel lockers. That decision, years before e-commerce reached critical mass, created a structural advantage that’s now spreading across Europe. The early years were about survival and building density; later came a turning point when scale economics kicked in and the company proved that a dense locker grid could be both cheaper and better for customers.
Acquiring Mondial Relay in 2021 gave InPost a bridge into Western Europe, particularly France, while the UK build-out added both scale and credibility. By 2025, the business had crossed a psychological milestone: more than half of total revenue now comes from outside Poland. That shift marks InPost’s evolution from a national champion into a truly European logistics platform.
The way the business makes money is surprisingly simple. Merchants and logistics partners pay per parcel delivered or returned through InPost’s network. Most of this revenue is transactional, linked to volume, but the economics improve dramatically with density. Once a locker is installed, the incremental cost of handling another parcel is tiny, which makes utilization the single most important metric.
Fixed costs – lockers, depots, leases, and IT infrastructure – dominate early on, but as parcel volumes fill each node, every extra shipment carries a high contribution margin. That’s why Poland’s mature network generates margins near the 50% range, while newer markets like France and the UK still lag but are steadily closing the gap. Management commentary and regional EBITDA trends tell the story clearly: when utilization rises, margins expand almost automatically.
Geographically, Poland remains the cash cow and operational template. Here, InPost is the clear leader “in terms of the number of APMs, but [they] have an even more clear leadership with over 70% of the number of compartments on the Polish market. Do note that the balance 30% is shared by many different brands with separate logistics, varying quality, separate IT systems and completely different strategies.” (Q4 24 Call) In total, InPost delivers around 50% of all parcels in Poland.
France has emerged as the second core market, and the UK has quickly become a major contributor after integrating recent acquisitions.
“#1 APM Network in the UK – Way Ahead of the Competition“
“In Q2, we deployed 85 APMs per week in the U.K., while key competitors averaged around 11.“ - Q2 25 Call
The rest of Europe – Iberia, Benelux, and Italy – is in earlier phases of rollout. As of today, InPost operates in nine countries:
Poland
United Kingdom
Italy
France (under the Mondial Relay brand).
Belgium (under the Mondial Relay brand).
Netherlands (under the Mondial Relay brand).
Luxembourg (under the Mondial Relay brand).
Spain
Portugal
The geographic diversification reduces dependence on any single economy, but it also brings new challenges: regulatory fragmentation, different labor structures, and varying e-commerce maturity levels. These are execution risks rather than existential ones, though, as the model’s appeal is universal – cheaper for merchants, faster for customers.
The value chain position is clean and hard to replicate. InPost sits between merchants and consumers, moving parcels from fulfillment centers to lockers and back through reverse logistics. Here’s another illustration from the annual report:
“And just to give you an example, we pick up in Poland from 130,000 places a day. 130,000 a day, we pick up parcels from the merchants, from the senders. 85% of those pickups is below 10 parcels. Now imagine that you want to send 2 or 3 different vans of 3 different companies to pick it up to deliver like InPost delivers next day, it means that one courier company will pick up maybe 2 out of those 10. The other one, the lucky one, maybe 4. And the last one, another 3 or maybe one. How will it change the cost of the first mile for those 3 players? And this is just the first one. Then you have the mid-mile where you have exactly the same problem. And then you have the last mile, where you split that utilization between a few parties. I mean, I don’t understand where the logic is behind, but only through consolidation of the full value chain, you may get to the point that something is better, cheaper, or at least comparable to what we do.“ - Q4 24 Call
The app is the digital layer that ties the system together – it notifies users, manages authentication, and nudges repeat use. Because the company controls both the physical grid and the customer-facing software, it captures valuable data and can optimize routes and locker placement better than competitors. Every new node strengthens the network’s convenience and lowers costs, reinforcing the flywheel. Moreover, app “customers order over 40% more than nonmobile app users, demonstrating the increased engagement driven by [the InPost] app’s convenience.”
Operationally, InPost runs a capital-intensive but cash-generative model once scale is achieved. Most of the expense base is fixed, so operating leverage is high. The company’s main variable costs are transportation (labour/courier & transport cost, APM maintenance), sorting, and handling. But what truly drives operating leverage, is APM utilization rates. As volumes and APM utilization rates climb, margins expand.
The best illustration of the operating leverage dynamics at work here comes from a write-up by Granular Capital, which broke down how parcel-level profitability scales with APM utilization. Their analysis modeled the economics per parcel under different utilization scenarios – from barely used lockers to near-full capacity – and the results clearly capture how powerful the fixed-cost leverage in InPost’s network can be:
At very low utilization (1–10%), each parcel delivered actually generates a significant loss. The APM gross margin sits deep in negative territory (roughly –100% to –50%), with contribution margins as low as –200%. Fixed courier and transport costs are spread across too few parcels, leading to heavy per-unit losses.
Around the 20–30% utilization mark, the model starts to show positive unit economics. Gross margins turn positive (roughly +12% to +33%), and contribution margins move closer to break-even. This reflects the inflection point where parcel density begins to cover most fixed transport and lease costs.
By 40–50% utilization, the economics look entirely different: gross margins rise into the high double digits (around 47–58%), and contribution margins reach roughly 30–45%. Each incremental parcel now adds disproportionately to profit as most costs are already fixed.
At 60% utilization, which Granular Capital noted as being consistent with InPost Poland’s disclosed levels, the contribution margin per parcel reaches roughly 55%, and the gross margin climbs above 60%. At that point, the business model effectively runs on operating leverage — every additional parcel drives high incremental profit with minimal additional cost.
In essence, their sensitivity analysis shows how APM networks behave like fixed-cost infrastructure: early-stage losses flip rapidly into strong margins once a critical mass of volume is reached. It’s a clean quantitative illustration of why network density – not headline parcel growth – is the single most important driver of profitability in this model.
From the Q3 Earnings Call
That operating leverage also defines where the company is in its life cycle: Poland is mature (but still posting +6% parcel volume growth in Q2) and harvest mode, France and the UK are scaling into profitability, and newer markets are in the early investment stage.
Over the next five to ten years, I expect group margins to drift upward as international units approach the economics seen in Poland.
Revenue per employee in FY 2024 was 327,000€.
Cyclicality is moderate. Parcel volumes track overall e-commerce activity, which softens in downturns of course. However, during slower periods, InPost’s value proposition – lower delivery cost and higher reliability – often gains share because merchants look to save on logistics. It’s not recession-proof, but it’s far from a classic cyclical that burns cash in the down part of the cycle.
“Group business is subject to predictable seasonality, as the vast majority of our business serves the e-commerce retail industry, which is particularly active during the end-of-year holiday season that runs from mid-November, starting around Black Friday, through the end of December. As a result of these seasona l fluctuations, the Group typically experiences a peak in sales and generates a significant part of sales revenue in the fourth quarter of the year.“
When it comes to measuring success, I care about a few metrics:
the number of active lockers and their utilization,
parcel volumes relative to market growth, and
profit per parcel.
These indicators capture most of what matters – network density, pricing power, and operational discipline. As long as utilization climbs, volumes outpace the market, and per-parcel profitability expands, the business is doing exactly what it was designed to do: convert infrastructure scale into compounding cash flow.
Who Are InPost’s Customers – and What Makes Them Stick?
The best way to think about InPost’s customer base is to split it into two intertwined groups: merchants and end consumers.
The company’s economics are driven by merchants, but its moat depends on consumer loyalty. Both sides benefit from the same thing – convenience that’s cheaper, faster, and more reliable than the old way of doing last-mile logistics.
Some relevant data points on consumer loyalty and engagement:
“It is important and very encouraging to see that our loyal user base is increasing year-on-year and that the majority of the users who switched delivery methods are lower frequency shoppers, so-called soft users. This means our business is very resilient, and it proves once again that our strategy, building a wide and loyal customer base, delivering top quality service and obsessing over user experience is not only sound, it’s paying off.“ Q2 25 Call
For merchants, the pain point is clear. Traditional home delivery is inefficient, expensive, and prone to failure.
Every missed delivery attempt adds cost
Every return drags on working capital
Every customer complaint erodes brand trust.
InPost solves all three problems at once.
By consolidating multiple parcels into one locker stop, it eliminates the cost of repeated trips, shortens the delivery window, and overall improves conversion rates:
For returns, it provides a frictionless drop-off system that increases customer satisfaction while saving merchants from handling costs.
If InPost disappeared tomorrow, many retailers would scramble to find an alternative that could replicate both the cost advantage and the consumer experience. They’d likely revert to legacy couriers or fragmented PUDO networks, which would immediately inflate costs and slow down deliveries.
Consumers use InPost for different but complementary reasons. The core proposition is control. They can pick up parcels whenever they want, skip the waiting and missed-delivery notes, and handle returns without printing labels or visiting post offices. Over time, that convenience becomes habitual. This is a critical insight we discussed above already. Once people have opened an account with InPost and are used to having a locker within a short walk, it’s hard to imagine going back.
So unsurprisingly, InPost changed people’s behavior in Poland and is now trying to replicate this success formula elsewhere:
“When we started in Poland in 2010, there was zero out-of-home solutions on the market. The whole market was door-to-door. So we went that journey from 100% door-to-door to now more than 60% of the Polish market being out-of-home. We changed people’s behavior and their social habits.” – From Quality Investing: InPost // Rafał Brzoska, 14. May 2024
Again, they plan to run this playbook in other countries too – I believe this is something critical to understand, especially when assessing recent and future M&A activities:
“In France, for instance, when we bought Mondial Relais, France was already 40% out-of-home market, but to PUDO points, to manually handle PUDO points. So we don’t need to transform the society. We are building on that existing setup.
In the UK, it’s not 40%, but it’s 10% of the overall volume being out-of-home. But UK is 8 times bigger market volume-wise than Poland. Means if I have tomorrow in the UK, not my 7,000 machines I deployed so far, but 23,000 machines from Poland, I will provide capacity for less than 5% British volume.” – From Quality Investing: InPost // Rafał Brzoska, 14. May 2024
That behavioral lock-in is one reason utilization rates stay high even when e-commerce growth slows.
The emotional attachment is interesting to observe. In Poland, InPost has achieved something close to cult-like status, not because of branding flair but because the service works. It’s fast, reliable, and integrated with the app in a way that feels effortless (I’ve mentioned my Netflix comparison before; Netflix simply provides a smooth user experience that “just works”). Consumers don’t “love” it the way they might love a luxury brand, but they rely on it, sometimes daily – and that dependency creates real stickiness.
Surveys show consistently high satisfaction and net promoter scores well above peers in the delivery space. In Western Europe, that same dynamic is emerging as coverage grows. Locker proximity and reliability are the biggest predictors of repeat use, and InPost’s density advantage keeps both high.
On the merchant side, the customer base is broad but concentrated around e-commerce retailers – from large marketplaces and fashion players to mid-sized online shops.
The level of customer concentration is reducing over time.
Top 5 marketplaces’ revenue contribution in Poland
We’ll discuss the dispute with Allegro further below. Not too long ago, roughly a third of all InPost’s Polish parcel traffic came from Allegro’s “Smart!” Today, Allegro’s revenue contribution is still high, but down to around 16% (vs. 18% in the first six months of 2024).
“And in terms of the overall like picture for the short to midterm, we definitely want to steer our consumer base, specifically by boosting our International expansion into the moment that the largest client with another portfolio will be below 10% of our revenue. And that’s, of course, something what we want to steer and we want to have our testing in our hands, not someone else.“ Q4 24 Call
Retention, in this kind of business, doesn’t look like a subscription renewal but like consistent volume recurrence. Merchants rarely churn once they’ve integrated InPost into their checkout flow because it becomes a core part of their logistics chain. Consumers show similar inertia: repeat rates are high (especially among app and loyalty program users). It’s a flywheel where old users keep coming back while new users add incremental volume, improving utilization rates.
While the company doesn’t disclose classic CAC or CLV metrics, the economic logic is intuitive. The cost to acquire a new consumer is primarily tied to network expansion and marketing partnerships, but the marginal cost of keeping that user is minimal once a locker is within walking distance.
“[…] in our home market, which is Poland where we started, almost 70% of the population has got less than seven minutes walking distance to the nearest locker. So it’s really very dense network. Thanks to this, it’s 24 seven access. It’s very convenient. You don’t need to wait for the courier. Not all the people are living in single houses, which means, you know, it’s easy for the courier simply to leave the parcel there. But people are literally now taking care of the security over their parcels and they want to control it. So when courier arrives, typically people are not at home. So it’s much better to order to your nearest locker and you pick it up whenever you want using your mobile app. You just press the button and the machine is opening your certain locker with your parcel.” – From Quality Investing: InPost // Rafał Brzoska, 14. May 2024
The lifetime value, therefore, compounds over time as the same customer sends, receives, and returns multiple parcels per year. Each additional order increases profitability because the first transaction effectively pays for the acquisition. In mature markets like Poland, that repeat behavior makes the business predictable. The locker becomes part of people’s weekly routines – like a digital utility that quietly compounds cash flow behind the scenes.
Simplicity & Predictability – Is This Industry Built for Compounding?
InPost operates in last-mile e-commerce logistics, specifically the out-of-home segment built around automated parcel lockers and partner pick-up points. As industries go, this one is attractive when you own the densest, most convenient network in a market.
And it’s a much better business model than the incumbent companies run!
Economics tilt toward scale – fixed assets dominate, utilization drives unit costs down, and once density clears a threshold, incremental parcels fall through at high contribution margins.
The product is clearly differentiated from traditional to-door delivery: it’s cheaper for merchants, more reliable operationally, and often more convenient for consumers. Of course, competitors could, over time, try to copy the infrastructure, but there’s little incentive to switch if you’re happy with the service InPost provides and have built the habit. Pricing isn’t the lever; network quality is.
Source: Morgan Stanley, Counter Point Global: “Insights: ROIC and Intangible Assets: A Look at How Adjustments for Intangibles Affect ROIC”
Change here is real but measured. Logistics doesn’t reinvent itself every two years; it compounds operational improvements and route density over time. The meaningful shifts in this category are strategic rather than faddish – e.g. a migration from to-door toward OOH, a steady rise in returns and C2C flows, and software layers that make selection at checkout effortless.
I believe I can say with high confidence that this business model will still exist a decade from now, because the core problems it solves – reducing last-mile cost and failure while giving consumers control – won’t go away. If anything, return intensity and consumer expectations harden the need for this infrastructure.
Cash-flow predictability stems from three places: recurring merchant integrations at checkout, repeat consumer behavior once lockers are nearby, and operating leverage that improves as volumes densify existing nodes. I can underwrite forward cash generation with a reasonable degree of certainty because the main inputs are observable – automated parcel machine (APM) footprint, utilization, per-parcel revenue and EBITDA, and market volume growth. None of these swing wildly quarter to quarter in mature markets. In earlier-stage geographies there is more volatility, but the path is still governed by the same mechanics:
Plant the grid, fill it, sweat it.
Competition is active but uneven across markets.
“From innovator to incumbent: While DHL – a classic incumbent – led network development in Germany, most countries saw innovative start-ups in the lead. For example, Poland’s InPost – founded in 2006 – has now reached a market share of almost 50 percent . In recent years, however, postal incumbents have begun investing in compelling out-of-home value propositions, given decreasing mail volumes and rising costs for home delivery.“ - McKinsey
In France, national-carrier brands cluster around a shared OOH network, yet price discipline and network density have been inconsistent, which leaves room for a specialist focused on lockers and PUDO quality. In the UK, large incumbents remain predominantly to-door or are late to lockers, while marketplace-tied networks are closed and therefore not directly comparable.
The pattern repeats elsewhere: broad players with legacy cost structures versus a focused operator pushing a simpler, denser OOH grid. Intensity exists, but the advantage accrues to whoever delivers the best coverage, the most reliable experience, and the lowest fully-loaded last-mile cost – simultaneously. That’s hard to copy without patience, capex, and operational consistency.
“This is a marathon. This is not a sprint. You can’t deploy 10,000 machines a year. You will not find locations. You will not prepare them. You will not sign all the contracts. You will not be able even to deploy more than... We deployed 6,000 machines in Poland two years ago.” – From Quality Investing: InPost // Rafał Brzoska, 14. May 2024
This is not a commodity race with a dozen indistinguishable carriers and razor-thin margins that evaporate in downturns. It’s an infrastructure game where the payoff starts small and becomes obvious only after years of compounding density.
“I see this as a steady long-term compounder at 40+% returns on capital as capex intensity continues to decline as a % of the total business.“ - Jake Barfield
To sum up, if I had to explain the business in two or three sentences to a colleague or a family member, here’s what I’d say:
InPost runs Europe’s densest locker-centric infrastructure networks in core markets and gets paid per parcel to move deliveries and returns through that grid. The more lockers in a city, the cheaper each parcel is to deliver and the better the service feels, so utilization and margins rise together. I like it because those mechanics are simple, hard to disrupt, and increasingly visible outside Poland as international markets scale.
Part 2 – Competitive Advantage/s Analysis
I see a real moat here, built on upfront CapEx and physical density, and maybe most importantly, operational know-how and consumer habits.
It isn’t impenetrable – no moat is – but the barriers are large and getting larger in the markets where utilization is compounding.
The essence is simple: once you’ve planted thousands of lockers in the right places and tuned the trunking, sortation, and route plans around them, every incremental parcel is cheaper and faster to handle. That advantage is hard to copy quickly because the asset base, landlord relationships, app adoption, and merchant integrations all move together.
You’d need time, capital, and patience to dislodge it. Most rivals don’t have all three.
“Yeah, and that’s a typical step-by-step approach. You can’t go to 46% of your EBITDA margin without having the whole setup. When we bought Mondial Relay, even now after two years, almost three years of transformation, still we are not a next-day delivery service across France, which is essential for us.
In our end-consumer mindset, next-day delivery is super important. We can’t provide this setup, not because we don’t want to, it’s all because the dense network of depots, France is much bigger than Poland, and when we bought Mondial Relay, Mondial Relay had only 20 few depots across France. In Poland, we have currently 70.
So to decrease the driving time from the salting hub to the depot, from depot to the locker, you need to have a dense network of depots. You can’t buy depots off the shelf. This is a two-year time horizon for investment.” – From Quality Investing: InPost // Rafał Brzoska, 14. May 2024
The Power of Focus?
Bringing up some of the well-funded competitors is a fair challenge, though – what’s to stop a bigger player from simply copying the model? After all, many already have!
Allegro in Poland, Amazon in the UK, DHL across Europe – they all rolled out their own locker networks.
Yet the results speak for themselves: Allegro’s lockers often sit half-empty, Amazon’s remain primarily for its own parcels, and DHL’s growth outside Germany has been sluggish.
On Amazon:
“Q: What about some of the larger e-commerce players, like I’m thinking of Amazon and Allegro in particular?
A: You know, Amazon is a great example. They have created a network of lockers in five countries. They haven’t created in Poland. They started collaboration with InPost from day one, knowing that we have already created best-in-class service in this country. Amazon is going into own logistics only if the existing players can’t deliver quality they expect from them or the pricing they expect from them. So this was a kind of remedy for Amazon to counterbalance dependency on the postal operators that collaborated from the very early beginning of their journey, both in the US and in Europe.
And when Amazon started deploying their lockers, it was after our first lockers were deployed in Poland. They started slowly, slowly, but then they noticed that still they have created such a door-to-door culture among their end users using their prime value proposition that for the end consumers, it hadn’t played any role to door or out of home, Amazon locker. There was no price incentive. […]
And recently, they stopped deploying lockers in the UK, for instance. And at the end of the day, even if their setup was successful or would be successful, it’s just narrowed down to your own consumers, your own marketplace. Do you think that a fashion retailer, competing against Amazon, or any other retailer competing against Amazon, they will try to use Amazon lockers? They would love to redirect their own consumers to Amazon and vice versa? I don’t think so. That’s why us being agnostic players, open for every player on the market, including marketplaces and platforms like Shopify, Shopper and the others, it’s much easier because we are neutral and we are helping all the merchants to grow their value proposition, making their end consumers even more happy and even more loyal to certain players.” – From Quality Investing: InPost // Rafał Brzoska, 14. May 2024
Replicating InPost’s formula turns out to be a lot harder than it looks on a PowerPoint slide.
The first reason for this is focus. InPost lives and breathes this model (“Leading in APMs and compartments is one thing, but knowing how to operate them is something completely different“) – every euro of capital and every engineering hour is directed toward making the out-of-home experience smoother, faster, and cheaper. For most rivals, lockers are just one of many side bets competing for attention inside a sprawling logistics empire.
You don’t build a 50,000-locker network on the side; you build it because it’s the only thing you do.
On DHL:
“Q: To what extent are you concerned about competitors? I’m thinking particularly of DHL. You mentioned they have 3 billion package volume. It’s taken them a very long time to build that, and obviously they operate in a lot of different countries. Are you concerned about DHL or somebody who is already a scale logistics player from building something similar to what InPost has?
A: “I can give you one example, a kind of illustrative one. Imagine you have two big planes producers, Boeing and Airbus. Okay, let’s not comment about one or another, but they are true. They are literally now focused only on building big planes. Why don’t they create business jets? It should be easy. It’s just a smaller plane. On the other hand, such an attractive market. Why the producers of business jets like Gulfstream, like Dassault Aviation, like Bombardier, Embraer, a little bit, they are here and there. But why those three are not inclined to go into this much bigger market, especially that one out of two has got problems literally now. Because the whole setup of those producers, both the big white body planes and the business jets, has been created for two different products. You can’t shift your factory from small business jets into creating big planes.
Software is different. Technology is different. R&D is different. People’s setup is different. So if you look at the big old fashioned, kind of old fashioned door to door focused players, their whole setup is focused for door to door. They can’t shift it from next day to another setup. The depot’s design is different. Their software for the drivers is different. Their skill set is different. That’s why even DHL, I think in one of the reports, they admitted that they believe in out of home, but on the other hand, they understand out of home is not something that will have more than 5% of their volume. Our mindset is 100% out of home. Only in Poland we have door to door, because this was a kind of legacy when we were on the postal market as well, competing against the state-owned Polish post. So we maintain that, but in all other geographies, we are just out of home. And the whole setup is all about out of home. That’s why we are much more efficient […]” – From Quality Investing: InPost // Rafał Brzoska, 14. May 2024
To add to that comment by CEO Brzoska above, here’s a quote from an expert interview with a former InPost director on this very same topic:
“I think DHL was ensuring they could subsidize other parts of their business that have lower margins, especially the postal business, which was declining as letters were disappearing. They still needed to maintain postal services and didn’t have much flexibility. DHL also has a significant presence in supply chain and dedicated transport for sectors like pharmaceuticals and frozen goods. In contrast, InPost is a more general provider. Overall, we have lower costs because we don’t need to maintain expensive equipment within our warehouse solutions or divert streams to dedicated zones.”
The second reason is scale economics. A few thousand lockers may cost a manageable amount – $50–100 million depending on the size of each (one APM may cost around $20,000 to install) – but scaling to InPost’s density means billions in capital before utilization even starts to improve (and we also discussed that it takes time to build the network – many years of focused effort!).
“By accelerating our scale, we are providing increased convenience for millions of customers. And our total out-of-home network, including pickup points, now exceeds 88,000 locations.“ - Q2 25 Call
And utilization is the flywheel. A locker with 2–3 parcels a day bleeds cash; one with 100 parcels a day compounds efficiency and margins.
“Myth #4: “Just trust me, our investment will pay off in no time” – or: an OOH automated parcel machine network is less expensive than home delivery. Reality: While it is true that a well-utilized locker network will easily recover investments made to build it up, the problem for many players is in generating utilization in a way that really saves costs elsewhere. As McKinsey analysis shows, the last mile in a home delivery network generates 60 to 70 percent of overall parcel delivery costs. Increasing the average number of parcels delivered per stop from 1 (typical for home delivery) to 5 (i.e., dropping 5 parcels at once into a locker or PuDo) drives down delivery costs (labor and vehicles) by more than 50 percent. Achieving this drop-factor cost reduction with OOH, however, requires high OOH network utilization. Without high utilization, there is only the added cost of operating an underutilized OOH network, where a single APM can easily cost EUR 10,000.” - McKinsey
“Revenue per parcel is low – InPost averages PLN 8.9 / €2.1 in Poland – and profitably distributing these parcels requires huge volumes and extreme levels of efficiency, so that the marginal cost of distributing each incremental parcel becomes negligible. To have the capability to do this, vast sums need to be spent on equipment, people and infrastructure, and huge sums are also needed to fund losses across the network as it scales up, presenting yet another hurdle. All in all, with these challenges in mind it’s no surprise that the parcel distribution industry generally has very high barriers to entry and tends to be highly consolidated, with most markets having just 2-3 scaled players.” - Granular Capital Ltd. InPost Write-Up (2024)
InPost’s network already runs on those high-utilization nodes, which makes every incremental parcel cheaper to handle – while new entrants start from near-zero density and must subsidize underused capacity for years.
“Exactly. And you know, for the platform, spending money on hard assets, on CapEx, is going completely away from their asset-light business model, completely. If you want to invest in hard assets, in logistics, it will cost you billions.” – From Quality Investing: InPost // Rafał Brzoska, 14. May 2024
Then comes the return calculus. For Allegro or DHL, building an independent network simply doesn’t offer the same return profile as partnering with InPost, whose infrastructure already exists and whose service quality merchants and customers already trust. It’s the same logic that drives enterprises to rent cloud capacity instead of building their own data centers, the same logic that drives oil companies to rent equipment from equipment rental companies like Ashtead Technology: the upfront cost, payback horizon, and operational complexity destroy the economics of going it alone.
“And nobody else, other than Amazon or Allegro or some of these other large e-commerce players, would have the volume to even justify building a logistics...” – From Quality Investing: InPost // Rafał Brzoska, 14. May 2024
“So we are getting to, I think, an ever better coverage with the locker network by working with various other partners. Probably most strategically important, Allegro One, our own operation, is getting very close to cost parity on a cost per parcel basis in the catchment areas that they serve.“ - Allegro Q1 Call
Finally, there’s the customer habit. You can recreate the hardware, but you can’t easily recreate the ecosystem – the app experience, the 99%+ next-day delivery rate, the merchant integrations, or the consumer trust built over a decade.
So yes, competitors can and do deploy lockers. But the evidence so far shows that unless they’re willing to sustain years of subscale losses, they rarely reach the density or loyalty required to make it worthwhile.
“Q: So that anticipated my next question, which was, so InPost has this giant market share that people have their packages delivered to, and now you’ve talked a little bit about this ecosystem part, but the question was going to be, I can understand why a consumer might have a package delivered to an automated parcel machine, but why might a consumer choose to have it delivered specifically to an InPost APM? And you’re talking about this ecosystem. So I guess a second sort of follow up question, answered however you like, is why couldn’t a competitor create a similar ecosystem and backend infrastructure to what InPost has?
A: Of course, you can recreate that, but you need to recreate every single element of that flywheel. Means not only the machines network, and right now we have more than 23,000 machines in Poland, and we have like five different players trying to replicate that by deploying more and more lockers. Even very often the lockers are on the same real estate, and we see that in our cameras, how many parcels they deliver to their machines, versus our courier. And it’s like in our machine, it’s 100 parcels a day, for instance, and their machine is two, three parcels a day. Why is that? Because at the end of the day, who votes for the service? The end consumers vote. And they vote for InPost because we are delivering seven days a week. Next day delivery is more than 99% of the parcels. Moreover, the cutoff times we offer for our merchants, very often it’s midnight. So you shop online 11 p.m. at midnight. It’s shipped from our fulfillment center, located in the center of Poland, where the main sorting hub is located. Means it’s picked and packed during the night, shipped to the final destination, and early morning it’s delivered to one of our machines, one out of 23,000 machines, even in a very distant location in a small village. So state-of-the-art logistics, state-of-the-art technology, mobile app loyalizing the end consumers. Now new services like InPost Pay implemented in the mobile app, where you can have one single checkout point. So answering in a short sentence, yes, you can recreate InPost, but you need to recreate every single element, and then you need to have a hope that you can take that customer from InPost and drag him to your side.
Otherwise, you know, if there is Spotify, another edition of Spotify created by a Chinese player, I don’t think so I will migrate if they have the same what we have now.” From Quality Investing: InPost // Rafał Brzoska, 14. May 2024
Walking InPost Through My Moat Taxonomy
On pricing power, I’d call the company measured. This is not a luxury brand that can name its price. Merchants are cost-sensitive and care about reliability, speed, and failed-delivery rates. For instance, contractually determined price increases were the reason for the Allegro dispute (to be discussed further below).
I found the following excerpt on InPost’s pricing strategy quite illuminating, which hints at a scale economies share mindset / corporate DNA:
“[…] in general, […] we look at the inflation, which is normally in the euro zone, where it’s Poland versus other markets. Our basic strategy is that we price with inflation, but wherever possible we don’t pass full inflation, and we’re able to do that because we’re focused on cost per parcel improvements and efficiencies, which means that if you look forward also at our profit improvement, of course, our profit improvement is coming from gross margin improvement and the SG&A efficiencies, but mainly gross margin improvement. So I would say, in Poland, if you look at inflation probably between 4%, 5%, the Euro zone further than Poland, 2% to 3%. What we want to do is to make sure that we keep our merchants happy that we are not able, not necessarily. We’re having to price everything through.“ - Q4 24 Call
So management’s stance in the calls and materials reads disciplined – push price where service quality and density justify it, but don’t jeopardize long-term relationships for a short-term margin bump.
Brand-based moats here are based on trust and a go-to status rather than conveying prestige. In Poland, customer satisfaction is exceptional, and recognition is universal.
In the UK, third-party survey data already shows top-tier NPS versus national incumbents, which is striking given how recently the locker culture is being built there. That brand equity lowers search costs – if you’re used to a specific locker five minutes away, you’ll pick it at checkout without thinking. It’s habit-driven and it should endure, provided uptime, cleanliness, and app experience stay high.
Switching costs are not really a factor for consumers and moderate for merchants. A shopper can technically choose another carrier tomorrow, but if their nearest locker is InPost and returns are label-less through the app, inertia is powerful. Loyalty features inside the app and the growing pool of registered users add soft lock-in on the consumer side as well.
“You push the button, you shop online, and you deliver, or the parcel is delivered to your preferred way of delivery, which is our locker. So we encircled our end consumer with those solutions. And then you need to ask yourself, for what reason I have to switch to other five players? Do I need five other mobile apps? Yeah, it’s like with Spotify. If you use Spotify, what’s the reason to use Google Music or Apple Music? Spotify is literally winning against much richer guys because of their innovation, services that are literally matching people’s expectations before they even think about them. And that’s the beauty of InPost as well. Extreme loyalization of the end users is bringing us this effect because of all those elements, not only one single element, which is the locker.” - From Quality Investing: InPost // Rafał Brzoska, 14. May 2024
On the merchant side, there are technical integrations at checkout, negotiated service levels, and operational flows for returns and customer service. None of that is impossible to unwind, but it’s somewhat sticky once embedded.
Cost advantages are the spine of the moat. As should be clear now, this model benefits from route density, consolidated drops to a single node, and fewer failed attempts. In mature geographies, that translates into a tangible cost gap versus to-door. Scale also matters in procurement, IT, and middle-mile infrastructure. The company increasingly shares those scale economies with customers in the form of better service at attractive price points – not unlike the “scale economies shared” flywheel you see in other great distributors.
Intangible assets aren’t about patents; they’re about permits, landlord access, local operating licenses, and accumulated playbooks for where lockers work and where they don’t. That knowledge is tacit and geographic – you earn it by doing. The proprietary app and consumer identity graph around parcels and returns are additional soft assets that improve targeting, placement, and utilization.
Network effects are both physical and digital. More lockers in the right places attract more merchants, which attract more consumers, which raise utilization, which fund more lockers. The app layer tightens this with notifications, returns, and loyalty. It’s a two-sided network with a heavy physical component, and the data it throws off makes the next placement smarter. That’s not the winner-take-all dynamic of pure software, but it is self-reinforcing in each city where density crosses a threshold.
Hidden moats show up in culture and integration. I think we discussed this part when we talked about the “power of focus” that made InPost what it is today.
InPost also fits neatly into the counter positioning bucket (a business that adopts a new, superior business model that incumbents cannot mimic due to the risk of cannibalizing the existing business) of the 7 Powers framework by Hamilton Helmer because it built a fundamentally different logistics model – one that incumbents like DHL, La Poste, or Royal Mail could not easily copy without undermining their own existing operations (we discussed this in the “power of focus” segment). Whereas traditional couriers rely on labor-intensive, door-to-door delivery networks and unionized workforces, InPost’s automated parcel machine (APM) infrastructure dramatically reduces last-mile costs (remember, 20-30%), increases delivery density, and shifts the consumer experience toward convenience and self-service. So this is a textbook case of counter positioning: a challenger adopting a superior, economically efficient business model that incumbents are structurally and culturally disincentivized to follow (or maybe the incumbents simply don’t have the corporate DNA it would take to build a comparable offering).
Moat directionality always matters. So is InPost’s moat widening or becoming weaker? In Poland, I’d call the moat stable to widening as the mix shifts further into non-marketplace, SME, and returns while EBITDA per parcel still rises. In France and the UK, the moat is widening at an even faster pace, but from a smaller base as density and merchant adoption tick up.
“The bottom line, InPost is the APM and leader across our European markets, and we are continuously widening the gap versus competition every quarter.“ - Q2 25 Call
What’s my bottom line in terms of InPost’s moat quality? Strong, durable, and expanding, with real but manageable vectors of attack. If I had a pile of billion of Euros in cash, I could certainly build lockers and hire teams. What I couldn’t buy quickly are eight-figure app users habituated to nearby nodes, years of property owner contracts in optimal micro-locations, high-trust brand scores in multiple countries, and the operating muscle memory to sweat a network at scale.
That’s the difference.
General Quality of the Business
InPost is a capital-heavy business on the front end and a cash-generating machine once scale is reached.
The locker model demands meaningful upfront investment – installing tens of thousands of machines, securing sites, connecting power, and building the backbone of hubs and depots.
But once a certain volume and utilization threshold is reached, and once the company starts reinvesting heavily into an expansion of the network (ultimately hiding the underlying profitability), this is a highly cash generative business; much more attractive than the legacy logistics business incumbents run. Once the grid is built, maintenance capex is modest. In Poland, the business is currently posting 33% EBIT margins, for instance (and almost 65% gross margins on the APM side; 44% gross margins on the group level in FY 2024). The lockers themselves are durable assets with long lifespans (15 years is the depreciation period) and limited wear, and new technology cycles don’t require wholesale replacement. Again, expansion spending still runs high in international markets, but that’s a reflection of growth phase rather than structural fragility.
Earnings quality is solid, there’s a recurring nature to it (!). It’s worth acknowledging that reported free cash flow in particularly has been temporarily masked by international build-out. Maintenance needs are there (annual maintenance costs are estimated between 10% and 20% of the initial capital cost); a good chunk of reinvestment is discretionary growth though. The distinction matters because when management decides to slow deployment, free cash conversion jumps. The operating leverage embedded in the model is already visible – same infrastructure, more parcels, higher margin. Over time, as InPost scales, CapEx intensity will normalize downward, and operating cash flow will compound without proportional reinvestment.
Customer acquisition costs are low by design. Once lockers reach density, new users come organically through checkout selection and word of mouth. The company doesn’t spend heavily on advertising because awareness is built into the experience – people encounter the brand every day in their neighborhood.
For merchants, onboarding involves software integration rather than sustained marketing spend. That makes incremental growth relatively cheap, especially once awareness crosses a threshold. The “build it once, earn on it forever” dynamic is one of the hallmarks of quality in this model.
Revenue visibility is high, even though the transactions are technically one-off parcel movements. Merchant relationships are recurring, and consumer behavior is habitual. Volumes correlate with e-commerce trends, but they don’t fluctuate violently. During weaker macro periods, merchants often lean harder on InPost because its economics are better than to-door options. We discussed all of that.
Diversification across geographies and service lines has strengthened materially. Poland remains the foundation, but international revenue now surpasses 50% of the total, reducing country-specific risk, and arguably, the international business will be (or could be) worth significantly more than the domestic business a few years down the line (more on this in part 7 - valuation). The mix includes B2C delivery, C2C shipments, and reverse logistics, which together smooth demand across categories.
Q2 Eurozone Data
Returns, in particular, have become a strategic growth engine – high frequency, high stickiness, and strong economics.
If the stock market closed for ten years, I’d be pretty comfortable holding this business. The economics are simple enough to understand and resilient enough to persist: physical network effects, low incremental costs, steady consumer habit, and a long runway for scale benefits to compound. It’s not asset-light, but it’s maybe “asset-smart” – heavy on infrastructure early, decently light on maintenance later. The core value proposition will still be relevant in 2035 because logistics doesn’t reinvent itself every cycle.
The only real challenge will be execution speed and balance-sheet discipline, not the durability of the business itself.
Past and Future Growth
Over the past decade, InPost has gone from a Polish upstart to one of Europe’s most distinctive logistics companies. The 5-year revenue CAGR is almost 55%. Growth has been stellar!
So revenue has compounded at a staggering pace since its early years, and growth hasn’t been a fluke – it’s been rooted in rising parcel density and an expanding geographic footprint, continuously outpacing market growth rates.
“In the Eurozone, we’ve expanded our network by 6,000 out-of-home points year-over-year, including 5,000 APMs. Just to give you a sense of how fast we’re growing in this space, in Q1, we were opening circa 5x more than our nearest competitor at 113 APMs weekly while all the competitors together in the Eurozone were opening 22 weekly on average, just to demonstrate the pace and execution of our deployment.“ – Q1 25 Call
The IPO in 2021 came just after that first wave of hypergrowth, marking the company’s transition from a single-market story to a broader European expansion play. Since then, the top line has continued to climb, albeit at a steadier rhythm, with international operations now driving more than half of group revenue.
Profitability has followed a predictable curve for an infrastructure business. Free cash flow was thin early on when the network was being built out, but as utilization improved, cash generation scaled quickly.
In Poland – the only market that’s reached full maturity – InPost’s free cash flow margins are comfortably positive, and growth has been self-financed for several years. Internationally, free cash flow is still suppressed by capex, but the underlying pattern is familiar: high upfront investment followed by rapid conversion once markets reach density.
Overall, the true underlying profitability of the business is still hidden on a group level basis:
The company’s historical consistency on that trajectory though – each new market resembling Poland’s earlier curve – gives me confidence that the reinvestments are productive, not value-destructive (“We expect for Q2, Q3 to go back to double-digit margin, and we will be accretive as of Q2 2026, which basically means that within 1 year, we will triple the profitability of the U.K. as become accretive.”).
Looking forward, the growth runway remains long and visible. InPost’s model allows for two forms of growth:
expanding volume per node and
expanding the node network itself.
Both still have meaningful headroom. Parcel density per locker continues to rise, even in Poland, and there’s still underpenetration in smaller towns and new verticals like C2C and returns. Internationally, the UK and France are scaling into what looks like the same exponential phase Poland hit years ago. In Q2 2025, Eurozone volumes grew well ahead of the broader market, suggesting genuine share gains rather than just category growth.
Management also sees significant potential in cross-border deliveries, where they want to be the low-cost disruptor:
“We’ll be strongly focused on implementing cross-border initiatives and plans. These include the unification of UX to improve our customers’ experience, wider international merchant adoption, enhancements in further logistics coverage and quality, and last but not least, expanding into the U.K. cross-border market in half 2 ‘25. E-commerce is a borderless experience for consumers. Our tech enablement, single merchant integration and consumer-centric focus put us in a strong position to capture share, but also to disrupt the legacy profit pool of those that have enjoyed charging EUR 25 per parcel as we target EUR 6 as the optimal price.“ - Q1 2025
“When it comes to cross-border, we don’t comment specifically on the volume mix and components within it. What I would say is that clearly, it’s a fast-growing segment within the business. It has been, not just in ‘24, but actually in ‘22 and ‘23, it’s also been developing quite well. If you look at markets like Italy, I’ve said in the past, at least growth has really been fueled by cross-border and now we see both a strong mix of domestic and cross-border volume within it. So as a growth opportunity, it’s still very early for us on cross-border across the whole network, including Poland. But clearly, we see it as a massive opportunity for the future, and we’re still very early on it. And I would probably more comment our cross-border volume in totality is more in sort of high single-digit low teens than actually saying it’s anything more significant than that at this point, but growing very fast, in terms of that potential.“ - Q4 24 Call
Pricing can contribute, too. While price increases aren’t the main driver, modest yield improvements tied to service upgrades and value-added products – returns, express lanes, loyalty features – could lift revenue per parcel without meaningful volume loss.
Let’s Discuss TAM
The total addressable market (TAM) is enormous ...
“And the market is growing. Means I will never, I don’t want to say never, I don’t need to be in a position, market position like I’ve created in Poland, to be more successful in the UK and in France than I am currently in Poland. Because markets are much bigger. The total addressable market in UK, France, Italy, in Spain combined is 30 times more than we have currently in Poland. That’s the beauty of it. This is really a blue ocean we are focused on now.” – From Quality Investing: InPost // Rafał Brzoska, 14. May 2024
While the Polish market facilitates about 1.5 billion parcels annually (and InPost accounts for roughly 750 million of that), Europe’s e-commerce parcel volume exceeded 15 billion shipments last year, with out-of-home deliveries still below 20% penetration in most countries. That gap is InPost’s opportunity.
Using a conservative bottom-up view – focusing on markets where the company already has or plans to build presence – the realistic serviceable available market is roughly six to seven billion parcels annually. Even if InPost captures just a low double-digit share of that, the math points to multi-year growth potential.
And the “pie” itself is expanding thanks to steady e-commerce growth and the secular shift toward OOH and returns optimization.
“Q: So you’ve talked a little bit about international expansion to the UK and to France, but you’re operating in some other countries. You’ve mentioned that the market for e-commerce in all of Europe is 40 times that of Poland. So I have to imagine you have an eye towards expansion in other countries.
A: You know, you haven’t provided guidance on anything, so I want to be careful there. But what is the dynamic like in some of these other countries? Is that out of home established Are there any players doing what InPost is doing in some of these countries? I’m thinking, you know, particularly Italy, Spain. Yeah, all in all, there are, I think, 20 different initiatives across Europe, including the markets we don’t operate, with different players trying to do lockers and out of home setup. And in the markets we operate, there are some players trying mostly in the PUDO space, because it’s cost effective, it’s cheaper, but it will progress. I think we will notice very soon some players disappearing from the market. We already or you may already see that in Benelux, especially the market is very, very challenging, very competitive in terms of all the players are there. There are already examples where existing players who started, now withdrawn from, for instance, from Netherlands. It’s not easy, because setting up the network is one element. Acquiring end users, making them happy and loyalize them, it’s a different story. So there is competition, there will be competition, irrespective of that, we are and we will be the biggest player in Europe, providing services to most of the clients at best potential level, best price, and definitely, you know, at the strongest ESG credentials as a proof of the whole concept.” – From Quality Investing: InPost // Rafał Brzoska, 14. May 2024
“To give a sense for the scale of the opportunity in International markets, it’s worth considering how large the European market for parcels is, and how capturing even a fairly small slice of that could be enormously value creative for InPost. If we just take the markets in the UK, Italy and France, they currently comprise about ~6 billion in annual parcel volumes between them, and if we conservatively assume that this grows at ~5% p.a. for the next 5yrs, volumes will then get to around ~7.7 billion units. If InPost is able to capture 20% of those volumes, they would then have ~1.5bn parcels from these three countries alone. At around €1 in EBITDA per parcel – approximately what they achieve in Poland today – this could represent ~€1.5 billion in EBITDA from these three countries alone, or roughly double what the whole InPost Group achieves today. If they are only successful in the smallest of those three markets (Italy), which has ~1 bn parcels today or ~1.3 bn parcels in 5 years’ time at ~5% annual growth, then a 20% share of that would still equate to a very valuable ~ € 250m in additional EBITDA. Given the growth runway and that early levels of profitability are considerably above expectations, it is not unreasonable to expect the international operations to be more valuable than the Polish core in the medium-term.“ - Granular Capital Ltd. InPost Write-Up (2024)
So based on all of that, can the market cap 10x? I absolutely think so. But not overnight. But there are many potential drivers of InPost becoming significantly more valuable over time, let’s call them the “three expansions”: geographic expansion, margin expansion, multiple expansion.
“[…] we have full focus on the key geographies we operate, for many reasons, but the Q1 is -- this is enormous opportunity. U.K. is 6x to 7x larger opportunity than Poland for InPost. France, Italy, Spain, combined, is another 8x bigger market opportunity than Poland. So we already became #3 in the geographies we operate. We definitely want to become #1. And the opportunity underlying there is massive. We don’t want to be distracted.“ - Q4 24 Call
“When we talk about the size of the market we usually give the volume CEP: Courier, Express and Parcel Services: B2C, C2C and returns. But let me give you the figures once again:
UK: 4bn
PL: 1.4bn
France: 1.6bn
Spain: 1.2bn
Italy: 1.1bn“ - InPost IR (h/t to Jake Barfield who messaged them)
—> for a combined 9.3 billion
Again, reinvestment opportunities are plentiful. The company can deploy capital in new lockers, middle-mile automation, technology upgrades, and digital services layered on top of the existing network. Returns on those investments remain attractive because each new locker or depot, once filled, generates incremental EBITDA well above its capital cost. The business doesn’t depend on M&A to grow, though targeted acquisitions – like Mondial Relay or Yodel – can accelerate entry into fragmented markets, and I expect this to remain a relevant capital allocation tool in the future.
When I think in base rates, I’d expect mid-teens annual revenue growth over the medium term and meaningful margin expansion as international markets mature. Those are realistic assumptions, not heroic ones.
As discussed, there are significant tailwinds. The mix of secular tailwinds – …
a growing preference for OOH delivery solutions (“Based on customer surveys conducted by McKinsey , the aggregated OOH volume in Germany, France, Poland, and Italy is expected to grow by 1.3 billion parcels up to 2027, while home deliveries are expected to grow by only 200 million parcels over the same period. This would translate to around EUR 9 billion in OOH revenues, 70 percent higher than today (15 percent p.a.).” – McKinsey),
increasing urbanization (“By 2050, approximately 83.7% of Europe’s population is expected to live in urban areas, reflecting a significant shift from rural to urban living. This trend is driven by factors such as economic opportunities, improved living standards, and access to services“),
growing environmental awareness, –
… recurring merchant integrations, low churn, and tangible network effects creates a growth path that’s both long and visible.
Few infrastructure-heavy businesses combine that kind of predictability with this degree of runway.
Part 3 – Management
One of the defining features of InPost is that it’s still very much a founder-led company. Rafał Brzoska, who is only 48 years old and who started the business in 2006, remains its CEO and public face. I highly recommend reading the Granular Capital Ltd. InPost Write-Up I cited a few times from for an in-depth overview of the longer-term history of InPost – it helps to better understand how Broska has probably learnt a thing or two from past mistakes, …
“InPost learned the “slipper rule” the hard way. Advent rolled back Brzoska’s wild expansion to four continents, which left the company thinly spread and overextended. “This was a classic scenario where you have a charismatic, very entrepreneurial individual managing a business that was growing very fast,” Różycki says. “But he took on too many projects with too few resources.”“ – Forbes (read it here; it’s an interesting article!)
… making him more focused today on expanding with boldness but with a clear plan, with discipline, and with profitability in mind.
The other key figure is Michael Rouse (51 years old) who was brought in to lead the company’s international expansion. Rouse joined InPost in 2020 and became a member of the Management Board the following year, taking executive responsibility for all international operations. His tenure has been marked by the acquisition and successful integration of Mondial Relay, which gave InPost a strong foothold in France and Western Europe. Prior to joining InPost, Rouse served as Chief Revenue and Commercial Officer at Klarna, where he oversaw market expansion, M&A, and the onboarding of major global merchants. The network he developed at Klarna has most certainly been helpful in accelerating InPost’s international growth strategy.
The CFO, Javier van Engelen, was only recently brought in – in 2024.
“Javier has held financial leadership and management board positions at international industrial, FMCG, retail and pharmaceutical companies in listed, family owned and private equity environments. He most recently held the position of CFO and member of the board of management for Signify, the global leader in lighting solutions. In his two previous positions, Javier was the CFO of Grupo Telepizza, a food operator, and CFO of Jerónimo Martins, a listed food retailing company with flagship Biedronka business in Poland.“
But back to Broska. The continuity of Broska in the role of the CEO matters because this is not a hired external management team brought in to run someone else’s playbook – it’s a business still run by the same operator who bet on parcel lockers when most logistics executives dismissed the idea as too capital-intensive and too early for Poland’s e-commerce market.
“I think the message I would love to share with the audience is we are continuously innovating. This is the DNA of the company. It’s still founder led.” From Quality Investing: InPost // Rafał Brzoska, 14. May 2024
Broska’s tenure now stretches almost two decades, and it shows in how the company balances entrepreneurial drive with operational discipline. Brzoska has navigated several major transitions: from an early postal services startup to a full-scale e-commerce logistics player, from near-bankruptcy years ago (in 2016 Advent International rescued him) to market leadership, and from domestic dominance to cross-border expansion.
Broska retains a substantial personal stake. Today, his total stake is around 13.5%.
It’s rare to find a founder who has grown with the business rather than being replaced once scale arrived, and that’s a central reason why the strategy has stayed coherent.
Brzoska’s background isn’t corporate in the traditional sense. He didn’t rise through the ranks of a multinational or rotate through a consulting firm. Instead, he built his knowledge on the ground – first through small courier operations, then by experimenting with automated lockers at a time when Amazon had barely started doing so in Western Europe. His operational intuition has proven valuable in an industry where execution often matters more than grand vision. What makes his leadership interesting is the shift he’s managed over the last few years: early on, InPost ran as a pure growth machine, with every zloty reinvested into new lockers. Now, under Brzoska’s direction, the company is evolving toward a more capital-disciplined model that still prioritizes expansion but with clear free cash flow targets and return hurdles.
As far as track record and integrity go, I haven’t seen any signs of accounting irregularities or governance red flags in the reports or transcripts. The financial disclosures are very transparent, and adjustments are mainly linked to the heavy rollout phase rather than opaque accounting treatments.
The founder’s public communication style can be described as charismatic and outspoken (listen to the podcast linked above), but his track record so far suggests execution rather than showmanship. The tone across the research report and recent calls is matter-of-fact rather than promotional, with a steady emphasis on unit economics, cash generation, and the trade-offs between speed and discipline. When expansion created short-term drag in international markets, management framed it as an investment choice, explained the timing and milestones for utilization, and tied those milestones back to margin progression. That’s the kind of straight talk I want – explain the why, quantify the near-term effects, and set markers I can track. I also see humility in how they describe the learning curve outside Poland. The message isn’t “we’ll blitz every market,” it’s “we’ll build density, learn and adapt as we go, prove the route economics, and pace capex to returns.” Admitting that some early assumptions needed recalibration in newer geographies is a positive signal, not a negative one, because it shows a willingness to adjust rather than defend a narrative
Overall, this is a management team that knows its industry inside out, led by a founder who has both operational experience and a proven willingness to evolve the business model as scale increases. That combination – entrepreneurial DNA, long-term alignment, and growing capital allocation maturity – is what gives me confidence that the next phase of InPost’s story can be managed as well as the first.
Compensation and incentives look decently aligned with us as “outside owners,” even though Brzoska’s entire compensation package is certainly generous at roughly $5.7 million, and so is Rouse’s at almost $4 million.
“The base salary for the Management Board members is set at the lower quartile compared to peers, emphasizing motivation through achievements. Simultaneously, the policy offers the potential for upper quartile variable remuneration through short- and long-term incentives, contingent upon reaching ambitious strategic targets. This variable component is directly linked to the achievement of challenging goals and business metrics, including financial and non-financial performance indicators, and aims to incentivize the Management Board to deliver exceptional results and long-term value creation.“
“The variable compensation is composed of the Short- Term Incentive (STI) and the Long-Term Incentive (LTI). The performance metrics, established by the Supervisory Board, include both financial (for STI and LTI) and non-financial metrics (for STI only), ensuring a balance between the Company’s various short-term and long-term objectives.“
Short-term targets are mainly based on business-specific KPI such as market share gains and financial performance targets.
Long-term incentives are based on EBIT growth (recently changed to EBIT from formerly EBITDA growth targets). I couldn’t find what exact growth rates Brzoska needs to hit though, which of course matters – are the targets ambitious or just a one-foot hurdle (if you find this info, please share it in the comments).
“In 2024, the SARC decided to introduce an important change and diversify the way success is measured in the metrics of parallel incentive programs. By changing the key performance indicator (KPI) in our Long-Term Incentive Program (LTI) to EBIT (operating profit) [note by the author: from formerly EBITDA], we are responding to the needs of our stakeholders, aiming to a better reflect the delivery against our long-term strategy and its financial robustness. By listening to the feedback of multiple stakeholders who prefer different and a more balanced set of indicators for the Short-Term Incentive Program (STI) vs the Long-Term Incentive Program (LTI), we have decided to diversify these metrics for the Management Board.”
Capital Allocation
If I had to summarize InPost’s capital allocation record in one phrase, I’d call it disciplined opportunism.
The company has shown a willingness to spend heavily when returns are visible and pull back when markets aren’t yet ready to absorb scale.
What’s distinctive is how each major capital decision – both organic and inorganic – ties directly to improving the unit economics of the network.
Improving the core economics
The clearest measure of whether management has used capital wisely is the improvement in the underlying economics of the core Polish business. Over the last decade, gross margins have improved, and then stayed high, as volume multiplied. Adjusted EBITDA per parcel has trended upward, and maintenance capex as a share of operating cash flow has dropped.
That combination – stable high margins and falling reinvestment intensity – shows that the existing asset base is compounding on its own.
Most incremental spend now goes to growth, not upkeep. The playbook is to build network density first, reach the utilization threshold where incremental parcels are almost pure contribution, then recycle cash into the next geography.
One interesting exercise one could do – which I’m afraid I haven’t come around to doing – is to calculate the ROIIC earned on new incremental capital deployed into the Polish business. However, given the profitability and success of the Polish expansion, I have little doubt that the ROIIC for the Polish segment has comfortably exceeded 20% (probably much higher!).
Historical consolidated group ROIC doesn’t look particularly impressive, but it’s important to realize that this is caused by the international expansion which requires massive CapEx, the integration of acquired foreign assets, and as discussed, the impressive profitability we can see in Poland, will only show in the newer markets once a certain scale has been reached. As integrations are completed and utlization rates go up, investors should see returns on capital increasing significantly over the next few years.
The capital allocation toolkit here is broad: heavy organic investment, selective M&A, and the optional use of leverage to accelerate footprint growth.
M&A: strategic, not scattershot
Acquisitions have been central to InPost’s story and deserve a nuanced look. Today the InPost Group is home to the following brands:
Here’s a brief and more detailed breakdown of their acquisition history:
Let’s discuss a few of them. The 2021 purchase of Mondial Relay was a bold, high-stakes move: it transformed InPost overnight from a Polish specialist into a pan-European platform. The logic was compelling – instant access to 15,000 pickup points across France and southern Europe and deep merchant relationships that would have taken years to replicate organically.
Market volume growth YoY
It also diversified the business away from Poland and accelerated entry into markets with fragmented last-mile infrastructure. Integration was messy at first. Margins compressed, and investors worried that the deal might dilute returns permanently. But the reports show that profitability in France has steadily improved as InPost replaced low-margin courier flows with locker-based volume and optimized routes. ROIIC on that investment is now visibly trending up.
The 2025 acquisition of Yodel needs to be brought up here as it followed the same philosophy, and is making InPost now the 3rd largest independent delivery operator in the UK (8% market share in the UK after aquisition). For context, Yodel was one of Britain’s largest independent parcel delivery networks, historically focused on to-door delivery and struggling to reach consistent profitability.
“On the last call, a quarter ago, we also updated that we’ve done an investment part into Yodel to really cement that partnership because 1/3 of our U.K. business today is to-door delivery. Clearly, our Menzies focus is very much on out-of-home coverage. But clearly, we can’t ignore the to-door penetration in the U.K. and the opportunity to convert that.“ - Q4 24 Call
The acquisition, announced in early 2024 and completed shortly thereafter, gave InPost an instant national footprint of depots, couriers, and – most importantly – merchant relationships. It also solved one of InPost’s biggest challenges in the UK: building the middle-mile infrastructure and delivery density necessary to make lockers economical at scale.
“[…] we’re focused on 5 key pillars of Yodel’s transformation, and you can see the progress now laid out on this slide.
The first is what we call one network. This is about fully consolidating the InPost and Yodel logistics networks to unlock efficiency, primarily in the last mile. We’re on track with the consolidation to complete mid-September and the opening of a brand-new sortation location in the Midlands and over 5,000 routes being removed and optimized to drive down a better cost per parcel.
The second is standards. This is about transforming operational discipline and governance in a business that has been well underinvested in for years. We’ve established a strong operating rhythm already to emulate the InPost standards that we have across the group. And our group operations center of excellence is supporting and rolling out the critical standards ahead of peak ‘25, and this will continue throughout ‘26 as we deploy mechanization and process adherence across all the legacy locations.
The third is sites and overheads. And already, as part of this program of transformation since we took ownership in the middle of Q2, we’ve consolidated or closed 16 depots so far.
The fourth is volume and brand. Our goal is to be the unique one-stop shop for U.K. merchants and drive that out-of-home unlocker adoption. We’ve secured exclusivity and co-branding deals already with some of the leading U.K. merchants. And this month, we’ll start the rebranding of Yodel with full brand conversion in early ‘26. Plus, we’ve already launched a redirections pilot, as you can see directly on the Yodel app. We have strong conviction in Yodel’s transformation and margin improvement in the medium term for the total U.K. business.
And this final pillar of out-of-home conversion, and one that I’ll cover in more detail in the following slides, but it is an important first step to build on the app redirection. But also we’ve been focused on restructuring and aligning the cost of the PUDO points to be more in sync with the InPost terms.
Ultimately, InPost’s acquisition strategy can be seen not merely as geographic expansion, but as a behavioral bridge – one that helps redirect and reshape consumer habits toward greater APM adoption. Many of the company’s acquisitions, such as Mondial Relay in France, provided an existing parcel volume base and access to a dense network of merchants and delivery partners. This volume acts as a transitional bridge: it sustains utilization levels and operational efficiency while consumers gradually shift from traditional doorstep delivery to the APM model. By embedding itself within established ecosystems and incrementally introducing the APM experience – faster pickup, lower cost, greater flexibility – InPost effectively uses acquisitions to compress the timeline of habit formation. In that sense, these deals are not just about buying scale, but about buying behavioral momentum.
“While we continue to add new PUDO points, we’re also closing those located too close to our APMs as part of our network optimization strategy with already over 2,500 closed year-to-date. Across the Eurozone, we are the #1 locker network.“ - Q2 25 Call
Other recent acquisitions further underscore InPost’s strategy of accelerating network expansion and APM adoption through targeted bolt-ons. The acquisition of Sending, for instance, strengthened InPost’s footprint in Iberia, adding operational infrastructure, merchant relationships, and parcel volume that serve as a foundation for introducing and scaling the APM model in Spain and Portugal.
On Sending:
“[…] as you know, organic growth is key for us, but we also expand through opportunistic M&A. In July, we acquired Sending, a logistics delivery provider in Iberia, specializing in fast door-to-door D+1 parcel delivery across Spain and Portugal. This acquisition has brought today Iberia and InPost offering full nationwide coverage, including the Canary and Balearic Islands, expanded logistics capabilities with 16 own depots and over 130 rented ones, plus access to a full last-mile courier fleet of over 1,400 drivers. Moreover, it brings also strong relationships with both large and small merchants in the region, position us to accelerate our expansion in Iberia, one of the fastest-growing markets, supported by a promising macroeconomic outlook. And really, we’re excited by the opportunity provides us within that region.“ Q2 25 Call
Meanwhile, the strategic partnership with Bloq.it, a leading smart locker technology provider, enables faster, more flexible network rollout across multiple markets by leveraging its modular locker systems and software capabilities.
On Bloq.it:
“Yesterday, we closed a minority investment in Bloq.it, signaling our commitment to the future of battery-powered APM technology. Together with Bloq.it, we’re now ready to roll out a new type of AI-led APM that we’ve been working on together for over the last 12 months. These units operate without the need for an infrastructure or solar panels, allowing us to deploy them in highly attractive yet previously inaccessible locations, particularly in city centers in the Eurozone and U.K. areas. This not only extends our reach, but also significantly reduces the deployment costs. So let me give you a sense of its importance. In the U.K. cities, we’ve had to reject over 10,000 locations in the past 2 years because they weren’t suitable for deployment, often with issues like lack of power, connectivity or expensive deployment costs. Now we’ve been able, with this investment and partnership with Bloq.it, to overcome these challenges. So although this slide sits in the Eurozone section, we’ll also deploy these new APMs in the U.K., as I’ve already mentioned. “In fact, we plan to add 20,000 battery-powered machines on top of our existing plans for standard APMs across the next 5 years, with already 2,000 of these units to be added already this year.” - Q2 25 Call
Overall, management has also been quite clear in that M&A will remain a major capital allocation tool in the future too:
“With regards to M&A overall, I think really, we remain opportunistic very much so, clearly, looking across not just the U.K. but all of Europe, as we think about what potential assets could be available and two, how they could complement our network in any element, not just in terms of logistics, but sort of either technology or even locker development linked to that, as we try to increase our penetration.” - Q4 24 Call
“When it comes to U.K. M&A, I think the specific question was minority. I think we’ve continued to see that, that is a really good path for us. We saw it with Menzies, where we took a minority investment really to develop a partnership. But as that partnership evolved, we really saw the opportunity to take full ownership of parts of the Menzies business, but not all of it. As we go forward, I think M&A and investment in that way, it will continue to probably be an attractive way for us to, one, solidify a partnership and then two, really evaluate whether actually an acquisition will be an attractive part, and I think sort of that’s -- sort of how we think about the structure and approach.“ - Q4 24 Call
Customer-focused capital allocation
A subtle but telling point is where capital isn’t going. InPost doesn’t overspend on marketing or vanity projects. Investment is concentrated in uptime, proximity, automation, and returns flows – areas that directly improve customer experience and utilization. This mindset – invest in reliability before advertising – is a form of customer obsession that I’d consider good capital allocation. Every zloty/Euro spent on making the network easier to use strengthens the moat and extends lifetime value.
Management Roasting Attempt
No management team is flawless, and InPost’s isn’t either. The first concern that stands out is the degree of founder dominance. Rafał Brzoska’s energy and charisma have been central to InPost’s success, but the same concentration of influence can create blind spots. Founder-led cultures sometimes slip into overconfidence – especially when the early playbook worked so well at home. Scaling that mindset across different regulatory, cultural, and labor environments is harder, and not every strategic instinct that served Poland will translate perfectly to France or the UK. But so far, Brzoska and his team are doing fantastically.
Second, while communication with investors has improved, it can still veer toward over-promising on timelines. Integration milestones and profitability targets for Mondial Relay, for instance, have occasionally required extensions. The explanations were sound – rising costs, slower-than-expected locker adoption – but repeated adjustments risk eroding credibility over time.
A third issue could be capital allocation pacing. The company’s appetite for growth remains high, and while management talks about discipline, expansion still consumes nearly all free cash flow, and I’d rather not see leverage levels trend higher from here. If returns in new markets don’t ramp quickly enough, that reinvestment rate could start looking aggressive; a few misjudged expansion waves could stretch both management bandwidth and the balance sheet.
Finally, the company’s growing international footprint introduces governance complexity. Different legal frameworks, labor relations, and ESG expectations can expose cracks in control systems. Nothing in the filings suggests malpractice, but rapid scaling across borders always raises execution risk.
In short, management deserves credit for vision and discipline, but continued success will hinge on two things: resisting the founder’s instinct to move faster than the markets allow, and proving that the current leadership team can institutionalize the same rigor abroad that made InPost dominant at home.
Part 4 – Balance Sheet and Debt: Liquidity, Leverage & Solvency
On the surface, InPost’s balance sheet might look slightly more stretched than a year ago, but beneath that headline there’s a picture of a company transitioning from heavy expansion toward steadier cash generation. As of Q2, total assets rose to PLN 15.3 billion as of June 2025, up from PLN 12.9 billion at year-end 2024. Most of that increase sits in goodwill, intangibles, and right-of-use assets. Goodwill climbed by about PLN 455 million, but it’s not yet alarming given the absence of impairments or write-downs in recent reports.
Liquidity and near-term solvency are solid. Cash and equivalents stood at PLN 885 million at the end of H1 2025, up from PLN 772 million six months earlier, despite continued capex outflows. Short-term borrowings total PLN 1.8 billion, while total current liabilities overall amount to PLN 5.4 billion.
When I step back to assess overall leverage, the picture looks manageable but not conservative. Long-term borrowings of PLN 4.0 billion and lease liabilities of PLN 2.4 billion bring total debt-like obligations to roughly PLN 6.4 billion. Annualizing H1 2025 free cash flow gives a rough run rate of PLN 108 million. But FCF is, of course, significantly depressed due to the ongoing international expansion. Annualized group OCF sits at PLN 1.9 billion, putting the debt-to-OCF ratio at roughly 3.2x.
Using adjusted EBITDA instead – arguably, a better indicator during an expansion phase – the company earns about PLN 4.0 billion annually (H1 EBITDA of 2.0 billion doubled).
According to management’s calculations, net leverage sits comfortably at 2.1x, slightly up from FY24 end.
With finance costs of PLN 385 million in the half-year, interest coverage is above 4x on annualized EBIT, keeping debt service within a somewhat safe territory.
I’d expect debt ratios to fall quickly as international capex normalizes and cash conversion increases.
“Operator: And Yes, just back to the webcast questions. We’ve got one from Francesco at JPMorgan. Can you please provide your view on the upcoming debt maturities? Do you plan to come back to the market anytime soon to refinance the Eurobonds considering that they stepped down to par in July?
Rafal Brzoska, Executive: […] As you know, we’re talking to all of you about this. So this should not come as a surprise. There’s been 2 phases. The first phase has been successful refinancing of the term loan that we had that we’ve completed at the beginning of this year, well, now in quarter 1, and that’s been basically significantly oversubscribed. So that was very positive. We know there’s a second maturity of the bonds ending in 2027. Here, obviously, we’ll be looking at all possible opportunities and options we have. There is no urgency today. So we’re going to be looking at what happens with interest rates. We’ll be looking at the market volatility. Also remember that our current bonds are very attractively priced. So we also have to balance that. So it’s going to be a question of looking at market opportunity versus the cost we have today, and we’ll be reviewing that internally and with some advisers throughout the year -- and when we will action, it will then be a question of maximizing the potential in the right moment to do so. But that will be clearly well above well before the maturity of the bonds going out.” - Q1 25 Call
All told, I’d call this a moderately leveraged but fundamentally sound balance sheet. In a severe downturn, debt would act as a constraint rather than a weapon – but not as an existential threat. The company could service interest and essential lease payments comfortably from operating cash flow, even if expansion were paused.
Operating Perspective: What the Balance Sheet Says About the Business
As always, I think investors underutilize the balance sheet more than any other financial statement. It can reveal a lot about a company’s underlying business operations.
Let me start with the big rocks: rights-of-use assets, property, plant & equipment, and acquired intangibles/goodwill dominate the asset side, while lease liabilities and borrowings dominate the liability side. That mix tells you almost everything about InPost’s operating model. This is an infrastructure network, not an inventory business, so inventory is near-zero and there’s no meaningful deferred revenue line because revenue is transactional, mostly not subscription-prepaid.
The heavy rights-of-use balance reflects site leases for lockers and depots; PP&E captures the lockers, sortation and handling equipment, and depot fit-outs; intangibles and goodwill reflect the build-and-buy strategy to accelerate market entry and bolt on merchant access.
InPost’s lease liabilities primarily relate to the lease of locations for its APM (Automated Parcel Machine) network. Here’s a breakdown of what’s typically included:
Land and site leases for APMs – the largest component. InPost does not own most of the land where its lockers are placed. Instead, it leases small plots or sections from landlords (e.g. convenience stores, petrol stations, supermarkets, residential complexes, transport hubs). These leases are typically multi-year agreements, sometimes with renewal options and indexed rents.
Warehouse, depot, and distribution centre leases – InPost also leases large logistics hubs, regional depots, and sorting facilities. These properties are crucial for the “middle-mile” part of operations and for servicing the APM network.
Office space leases – a much smaller portion, covering headquarters and administrative offices in Kraków and other countries.
So, in accounting terms, the lease liabilities on InPost’s balance sheet reflect the present value of future lease payments for all these contracts (under IFRS 16). The corresponding right-of-use assets represent the value of the leased properties themselves — mainly the land plots under lockers and the logistics facilities.
On the working-capital line items, short-term trade receivables are sizable, but they’re offset by equally sizable trade payables and other payables, yielding a structurally negative working-capital position that funds the business rather than drains it.
That pattern is consistent with high-velocity parcel flows: merchants settle on standard terms after service delivery; the company pays suppliers on its own terms; there’s minimal inventory to carry; and cash conversion is driven more by capex cadence than by the cash conversion cycle of operations. Put differently, the P&L’s conversion to operating cash is healthy once you adjust for leases and taxes, and the step-function in free cash flow lives or dies by how aggressively management is expanding the grid. Does the balance sheet reveal a capital-light or asset-heavy model? Asset-heavy up front, asset-light to maintain. The large PP&E and rights-of-use balances show that scale comes from planting and powering a dense physical grid, then sweating those assets. The small maintenance capex line in the cash-flow bridge confirms that once the grid is in, keeping it running is cheap relative to the cash it throws off. There’s no mismatch between the operating story and the accounting reality: low inventories and no deferred revenue fit a per-parcel logistics engine; high leases and PP&E fit a locker-centric network with route density economics; rising intangibles and goodwill fit a program of targeted M&A and software/app layers that make the grid more valuable. Even the growing deferred tax liability is on-message: it’s what you expect when profitable jurisdictions and accelerated tax depreciation interact with a network expanding across borders. Net-net, the balance sheet reads like a map of the moat: hard assets and long-dated site access on one side, habitual merchant and consumer usage on the other, with negative working capital acting as a quiet source of funding as the grid fills.
Off-Balance Sheet Items & Hidden Risks
There’s little here that changes the investment case in a meaningful way. InPost’s reporting is straightforward, and the nature of its business doesn’t lend itself to complex off-balance sheet engineering. Lease obligations are already capitalized under IFRS 16, so what used to be a common blind spot in logistics – long-term site commitments – is now fully visible in the “rights-of-use assets” and “lease liabilities” lines. That transparency reduces one of the biggest historical risks in the sector.
Pension or defined-benefit exposure is immaterial. The company’s “long-term employee benefits” line sits at roughly PLN 12 million, negligible relative to EBITDA or equity, so there’s no hidden retirement liability. The same goes for government grants and provisions – small, one-digit millions that don’t move the needle. No large special-purpose vehicles, supplier guarantees, or off-book debt arrangements appear in the filings, and nothing in the transcripts or Q2 slides hinted at contingent liabilities tied to acquisitions.
The main residual risks are operational rather than accounting-related. InPost operates across multiple jurisdictions, so there’s always a possibility of local tax disputes or regulatory claims, but these would likely be modest compared to the scale of the business. There’s no record of material lawsuits, environmental obligations, or warranty exposures. The one area to watch would be potential reclassifications tied to new lease accounting interpretations or local tax audits, which could pull a small portion of service contracts onto the balance sheet, but that wouldn’t materially change leverage ratios.
In short, there are no meaningful off-balance-sheet items or contingent liabilities that distort the company’s financial position. The risks that matter – execution abroad, pace of locker rollout, and macro sensitivity – are fully visible above the line, not buried in the notes.
Part 5 – Inversion and Risks
As my regular readers will know, whenever I analyze a company I like to flip the question upside down:
Why could I be wrong?
InPost looks like a well-run, capital-efficient physical-based network business, but there are still a few ways this story could go off track.
But maybe first of all, why is someone else selling me their shares in InPost at the current price? Maybe fatigue? The stock has spent several years being “just around the corner” from showing full international profitability, and some investors have possibly simply run out of patience. The story has demanded faith in a multi-year rollout (time arbitrage), and those who expected faster convergence of margins between Poland and Western Europe may see each delay as proof that the flywheel works slower abroad.
You might enjoy this read focused on this topic:
A second group of sellers likely focuses on the balance sheet. Expansion remains capital-intensive, debt is still noticeable, and headline free cash flow in recent quarters looks weak when capex isn’t normalized. For investors who prize pristine balance sheets and immediate cash returns, that combination is uncomfortable.
Finally, some may fear that the very strength of the Polish business is hiding the fragility of the European one – that the model’s economics might not translate perfectly across markets with different urban layouts, labor laws, and consumer habits.
The Allegro Dispute
A key flashpoint in InPost’s recent history – and arguably its single most material short-term risk and the possibly #1 reason for why there have been more sellers than buyers – has been the dispute with Allegro, Poland’s dominant e-commerce marketplace and, until recently, its single biggest customer.
Allegro controls roughly half of the country’s online retail market and for years relied on InPost as its de facto logistics backbone. The partnership dates back to 2014, when InPost won a major contract to deliver Allegro parcels and rapidly became the main carrier for the platform’s “Smart!” membership program – a service similar to Amazon Prime, offering free delivery above a certain order value. In that setup, Allegro pays couriers like InPost directly for each Smart! delivery, creating a large, recurring B2B revenue stream.
By the time of InPost’s IPO in early 2021, Allegro accounted for around 62% of its parcel volumes and nearly half of its revenue. Roughly a third of all InPost’s Polish parcel traffic came from Smart! deliveries alone, representing about 25% of Polish revenue during the nine months to September 2020. Another 20% of revenue came from orders placed via Allegro’s marketplace but paid for by merchants themselves – where Allegro had limited influence over the carrier choice.
In other words, both companies were deeply interdependent: Allegro couldn’t serve its customers without InPost’s reach, while InPost’s early success depended heavily on Allegro’s checkout traffic.
That dependency became a source of tension when inflation surged in the COVID years. The 2020 “Framework Agreement” between the two companies – which set price levels, minimum volumes, and adjustment mechanisms – included inflation indexation clauses. When Polish CPI climbed into double digits, InPost’s per-parcel delivery fees rose sharply.
From Allegro’s perspective, costs ballooned just as its own margins were being squeezed by rising fulfillment and marketing expenses. What began as a contractual friction soon turned into a strategic divergence. Allegro concluded that relying so heavily on InPost posed a structural vulnerability and, in 2021, launched its own logistics arm, Allegro One, to internalize part of the last-mile network and build a parallel APM and courier infrastructure.
By 2023/2024, the conflict was out in the open. InPost accused Allegro of “tricking” users into changing delivery preferences in its checkout flow, pushing parcels toward Allegro OneBox even when customers had explicitly selected InPost. InPost responded with legal action, arguing that Allegro’s behavior violated both consumer choice and the spirit of their contract. In 2025, InPost initiated arbitration proceedings for around €27 million against Allegro for making it difficult for customers to choose their delivery method.
The short-term impact was visible in slower domestic growth and renewed investor anxiety about customer concentration. But strategically, InPost used the rupture as a forcing function to accelerate diversification. It deepened ties with non-Allegro merchants, fashion retailers, and SMEs, and grew its C2C and returns segments to offset the lost Allegro flow. Today, Allegro Smart! deliveries represent a much smaller percentage of InPost’s Polish revenue and an even smaller % of total group revenue.
Meanwhile, Vinted has overtaken Allegro as InPost’s single largest customer.
“As you know, our main partner in Poland has recently decided to broaden their logistics options. We completely respect the fact that the large platforms want to diversify. We understand the approach. We just don’t love the style.
They announced it openly at the beginning of the year and started pushing to change consumer habits, tricking users to choose other delivery companies against stated user preferences. In fact, last quarter, Allegro really stepped up their efforts trying to redirect parcels from InPost to their own Allegro OneBox. Not a huge surprise. But if you look at the social media in Poland, you saw plenty of frustrated customers. At one point, we estimate that even 30% of our Allegro parcels came with a suggestion to change the delivery option even when customers had clearly chosen InPost. First of all, we believe this practice doesn’t just bend the rules of our contract with Allegro, but is against the very basic consumer right to have a parcel delivered to the APM of their choice. That’s why we have started legal action to stop it. Second, the real effect on our business was small, only less than 2% of volume was shifted. Interestingly, out of this 2% parcel, more than 80% went to Allegro’s OneBox, while other Allegro partners were barely promoted despite having larger out-of-home networks. What’s more interesting, these redirections into OneBox hit all delivery companies, not just InPost, including Allegro’s own delivery partners.“ Q2 25 Call
For Allegro, the calculus has also evolved. After multiple failed attempts to build an equivalent delivery operation the company has taken a more pragmatic stance. It quietly de-emphasized its ambitions to scale Allegro One and has instead focused on securing favorable terms under the renewed 2024 Framework Agreement. There’s also a new CEO in place since May 2025.
It also seems like the two have found an agreement for future years:
On September 18, Allegro’s management team said this on the Q2 call:
“When it comes to the pricing, obviously, we are talking with InPost and it’s too early to make any predictions about if and when we will come to conclusions. We are very constructive about the situation, but we do need to see lower prices. And Marcin, if there’s anything you want to add to that?“ - Allegro Q2 Call
And then on October 1, InPost announced:
“[…] as of On 1 November 2025, we are reducing the price of the Allegro Paczkomat® 24/7 InPost service . The new price that will apply from this date will be PLN 8.90 net (PLN 10.95 gross).“
Overall, the Allegro saga underscores a broader lesson about platform dependencies. When one marketplace controls such a large share of checkout traffic, even a logistics leader can be temporarily sidelined by contractual disputes. Yet the long-term logic of efficiency and customer preference favors consolidation, not duplication. Two overlapping locker networks in the same geography are unlikely to coexist efficiently for long. In that sense, the Allegro episode is both a stress test and validation of InPost’s moat – proof of how resilient the network is under strain, and a reminder that power in logistics ultimately flows to whoever controls density, reliability, and habit.
Devil’s Advocate Case
If I had to build a devil’s advocate case beyond the Allegro dispute, I’d start with these counterarguments/risks:
First, scalability risk: what if the unit economics outside Poland never reach parity? Locker density and, most importantly, consumer adoption might plateau below the critical mass needed to generate Poland-like margins. Labor costs in Poland are also cheaper. What if the path to mature-market margins outside Poland is (much) longer than anticipated?
Second, competitive compression: national postal incumbents and large e-commerce platforms could accelerate their own locker rollouts, narrowing InPost’s cost advantage or locking merchants into closed ecosystems. It’s also worth highlighting that, to some extent at least, the network effects are localized.
“We’re now at 17,000 lockers across the Allegro Delivery. And importantly, unlike InPost, because all 3 of these players are startup in a start-up phase, if you like, we’re not covering the whole country yet. We’re covering bigger cities and bigger towns, not primarily. So we’re getting to the point where, in essence, there’s locational parity, give or take, with InPost. So -- and that we think is a key factor.“ - Allegro Q1 Call
In Western Europe, national incumbents and marketplaces are experimenting with their own OOH networks and beefed-up PUDO offerings. France has well-entrenched postal incumbents; the UK has national carriers with brand recognition; marketplaces in both countries can steer checkout choice. If rival networks achieve real density in key catchments, differentiation compresses, and InPost’s cost edge narrows.
Third, capital allocation slippage and execution risk: the company might overextend itself through another large acquisition or maintain expansion spending longer than cash generation supports, eroding returns on incremental capital. Given InPost’s rock-solid position in its home market and the current valuation attributing little value to international operations (to be discussed below), one of the most tangible downside branches stems from execution missteps – either management undermining the Polish core or mismanaging international ventures. The comfort is that Poland’s cash-generating base is now much larger and profitable enough to absorb moderate missteps, but investors should watch early signs of focus drift or declining service KPIs closely.
Technology is another double-edged variable. Emerging delivery technologies such as drones or humanoid robots could, in theory, change the logistics industry, but their feasibility varies sharply by geography. The economics of out-of-home (OOH) delivery dictate entirely different approaches across urban, suburban, and rural areas. In dense European cities – where InPost’s locker network thrives – airspace constraints, regulatory hurdles, and short-distance routing make drone delivery impractical at scale.
“Myth 2: “We want to focus on lockers only” – or: OOH networks will look the same throughout a country. Reality: The economics of OOH delivery dictate completely different approaches for urban, suburban, and rural areas. OOH networks are most attractive in urban areas with high population densities that make it possible to cover numerous consumers within an OOH access point radius (i.e., 500 to 1000 meters). Such high densities also enable the economical deployment of fixed-capacity lockers, since utilization is likely, if not guaranteed. Suburban areas have substantially lower population densities, driving OOH access point utilization down unless consumers show greater willingness to travel longer distances to these points. This decreases the viability of fixed-capacity, high-capex lockers, mandating a shift towards a more PuDo-oriented network setup. Finally, rural areas are so sparsely populated that home delivery will likely remain dominant, since lockers will not see sufficient utilization for economic benefit and PuDo partners are often much harder to find.“ McKinsey
Rural regions might eventually see selective drone deployment for low-density routes, but that would serve as a complement rather than a substitute to OOH networks.
Further out, humanoid robots or autonomous ground units could reshape local delivery cost structures, potentially offering both disruption and opportunity. If adopted intelligently, such technologies could enhance last-mile efficiency and reduce dependency on and cost of human couriers, expanding InPost’s margin potential rather than undermining it. For now, these innovations remain more conceptual than commercial, but technological leapfrogging is an ever-present variable in logistics.
Customer concentration risk – we just discussed this – is going down but it is real enough to track quarter by quarter. Large marketplaces and fashion platforms account for meaningful volume in core markets.
Regulatory, policy and permitting risk is another slow-burner. Locker placement needs municipal goodwill, power hookups, and neighborhood acceptance. Governments often welcome lockers for emissions and traffic reasons, which lowers regulatory hostility, but that doesn’t eliminate local frictions – noise ordinances, aesthetics rules, or new fees can appear. The risk isn’t an EU-wide clampdown; it’s cumulative micro-drag that slows deployment or adds cost.
InPost’s dominance at home also introduces the theoretical risk of regulatory intervention. As parcel delivery becomes increasingly viewed as a quasi-utility, government bodies may feel pressure to ensure access and fairness. While there’s currently no evidence of predatory pricing or abuse of power, potential remedies could include forced network access, price caps, or other forms of regulation. Such measures would compress margins but are unlikely to destroy the franchise.
Labor, cost inflation, and service-level execution are tightly coupled. Western Europe’s wage floors, unionized labor environments in parts of France, and tight subcontractor markets raise the bar on predictable service delivery at targeted unit costs. A sequence of wage hikes or seasonal capacity shortages can crimp contribution margins until new pricing washes through. The business has operational levers – route optimization, a mix shift toward lockers over to-door, and automation – yet the timing mismatch between cost shocks and price resets remains a structural exposure.
Cybersecurity, data privacy, and app trust form a distinct risk cluster. The InPost app controls authentication and underpins habit formation; its databases contain personal identifiers and delivery metadata. A GDPR incident or prolonged service outage would be reputationally costly and could trigger regulatory fines. While low-probability, such events are high-severity. The practical mitigation lies in layered security, incident-response maturity, and redundancy protocols – but investors should still mentally underwrite a one-off cost of a breach and some temporary demand friction.
FX and macro exposures also matter for reported results and debt optics. The company reports in PLN but earns a large share of revenue in EUR and GBP. Translation swings can distort reported growth and leverage metrics without reflecting underlying unit economics. That volatility can feed narrative risk – de-ratings on optics rather than fundamentals – particularly if FX moves coincide with a softer e-commerce quarter.
Balance-sheet resilience was discussed in part 4 above. It’s something I will keep an eye on.
Extrinsic risks – those that can’t be “managed away” – stem, as discussed, from macro and policy drift. A further, admittedly low-probability but non-zero extrinsic risk is geopolitical: a deterioration in Eastern Europe’s security environment. Recent drone incursions and border incidents have revived concerns about Russia’s intentions toward NATO’s eastern flank. A direct invasion of Poland would represent a massive escalation – Poland being both an EU and NATO member – yet investors cannot fully dismiss the tail risk of such an event disrupting logistics infrastructure, cross-border routes, or financial stability. None of these risks point to existential failure – the network is valuable and redeployable – but they can compress investor confidence and stretch a two-year plan into a four-year one.
Stock-based compensation (SBC) and equity discipline belong on any risk log. While InPost’s reported SBC has so far remained modest, incentive programs can scale quietly over time. The company’s current structure mitigates some dilution by requiring that shares granted under the long-term incentive plan be repurchased on the open market by InPost or its subsidiaries at settlement, rather than issued anew.
“During the Annual General Meeting of Shareholders dated 19 May, 2022, it was decided that shares granted will be purchased from the Market by In Post S.A. or its subsidiaries when the programme is settled. The granted shares value is calculated as the average price of In Post. S.A. shares on Euronext stock exchange over the 60 days period prior to granting.“
The value of granted shares is based on the 60-day average price on Euronext, linking management reward to sustained market performance rather than short-term spikes. Even so, generous compensation packages at the top level and the potential for expanding performance-based schemes introduce a latent dilution risk. Over multiple years, these programs can meaningfully influence ownership dispersion and capital allocation flexibility if not tightly governed. Investors should monitor both the quantum and structure of future awards as the company matures.
Bottom Line: If InPost Underperforms …
If the company underperforms over the next five to ten years, the headline reason would probably be that international markets failed to reach scale fast enough. The narrative would read something like, “InPost’s low-cost advantage in Poland proved difficult to replicate abroad, leaving profitability uneven and leverage elevated.” A short seller might argue that the model is inherently local, that logistics density doesn’t travel well across borders, and that management’s ambitions outstrip the balance sheet.
That short thesis isn’t ridiculous – it’s just incomplete. The Polish experience provides empirical proof that the economics can work, but it’s true that replicating them at continental scale will take longer and require more operational patience than the market sometimes allows. But therein lies the opportunity.
I always ask myself whether I’m rationalizing anything. The most tempting rationalization here is assuming a smooth trajectory from early losses abroad to mature margins. Real-world scaling rarely looks linear. Utilization can flatten temporarily, landlords can slow approvals, and competition can respond faster than expected.
I also need to remind myself that InPost’s advantage to some degree rests on execution, not on a regulatory moat. If management stumbles or misallocates capital, the model’s strength won’t automatically save them.
Would I short this company if I had to pick one in my portfolio? No. It has too many tangible assets, too much recurring demand, and too visible a path to scale for that to make sense. But I can see why others might hesitate to go long – it’s a story that still requires a tolerance for messy quarters and uneven free cash flow.
False Moat Analysis
When investors talk about ”moats,” sometimes the word comes up too casually. In InPost’s instance, the company’s dense locker network looks pretty “moaty” at first glance, but a closer look reveals nuances that separate a real moat from a potentially overstated one.
To stress-test it properly, I like to strip away the narrative and ask whether the barriers are structural or merely circumstantial.
Let’s start with network effects, because that’s the lens most investors instinctively reach for. In theory, every new locker adds incremental value to the system by improving convenience, lowering delivery costs, and making the platform more attractive to both consumers and merchants. That’s true, but only up to a point. The network effect here is more logistical than social – density drives efficiency, not necessarily stickiness.
It’s also profoundly local: a locker in Lyon adds no utility to a user in Leeds. Each market has to reach its own critical mass before the flywheel turns, and local density matters far more than total scale. The incremental value of each new locker also declines once a market reaches high coverage density. Beyond that, the advantage shifts from network expansion to operational efficiency, which can be replicated by well-funded incumbents. If La Poste or Royal Mail accelerates their own rollout, the density advantage narrows faster than most investors expect.
On the network spectrum we discussed for Timee in the last deep dive (localzed vs. global; commoditized vs. differentiated), InPost sits closer to the commoditized end: a service where execution, reliability, and cost position dominate over pure network externalities. The product itself – parcel delivery – is largely interchangeable; the differentiation comes from convenience and consistency, not identity or exclusivity. The moat therefore compounds locally, market by market, rather than globally across the platform.
Merchants can and do multi-tenant across different carriers, and in many markets, they are required to offer multiple delivery options at checkout. That limits the exclusivity and weakens the flywheel. From a consumer POV though, there are strong incentives to go with one APM provider if presented with the choice (and they’ll of course go with the most reliable, fastest, and cheapest provider with the closest APM; this is where network density matters again):
“There are also benefits for customers from using the same APM, and from using a single APM provider. Using multiple APMs owned by several network owners is less convenient than being able to visit just one, which benefits the first mover as they are most likely to have the incumbent relationship with customers and merchants.“ - Granular Capital Ltd. InPost Write-Up (2024)
Switching costs are another area where optimism often drifts into exaggeration. The technical integration for merchants – APIs, plug-ins, checkout flows – is sticky but not immovable; most commerce platforms support modular connectors that make adding or dropping carriers feasible. Consumers are habit-driven rather than locked in: proximity and convenience dominate, and if a rival installs a locker closer to home or work, the friction to switch is low. App and loyalty features help, but they don’t prevent multi-tenanting. That said, onboarding friction can create micro-stickiness in practice. Part of my scuttlebutt research was creating a DHL account required to use DHL’s APM network. With DHL, in Germany at least, setting up Packstation (German for APM) access requires POSTIDENT (video or in-person identity verification) or a mailed code – an annoying hurdle that discourages repeating the process with multiple providers. Unfortunately, as I learned, by contrast, InPost consumer accounts are typically activated via app with phone/SMS verification, not formal ID checks; identity verification at InPost is primarily for business customers under AML rules and handled internally (electronically or via InPost staff), not through PostIdent. So while switching is technically and behaviorally easy, small verification hassles and setup inertia can slow churn more than clean theory suggests, especially in markets where incumbents enforce strict KYC at signup.
The cost advantage is more tangible. InPost’s efficiency comes from drop density, superior processes, and automation, not from a proprietary technology or unique material cost curve. With capital, time, and local permits, other players could, in theory, replicate the model. The real question is whether those players will – and whether they can do it without cannibalizing their own legacy to-door operations. That’s been InPost’s saving grace so far: incumbents are slow to disrupt their own infrastructure.
As for brand, InPost’s strength lies in trust and reliability, not in prestige or emotional affinity. It’s a functional brand – people use it because it works, not because it signals status. That’s both good and bad. On the one hand, the brand is highly defendable in markets where performance is visible and repeat usage is frequent. On the other, it’s replaceable if competitors match service levels. Consumers won’t pay a premium for the name alone; they’ll pick the locker that’s closer or cheaper.
So, how strong is the moat really? It’s strong in Poland, emerging elsewhere, but bears would argue, it’s not untouchable. The barriers are economic and logistical, not proprietary or emotional. They rely on habit, density, and efficiency – advantages that can fade if competitors match the playbook or if the economics of locker installation shift. InPost has built something formidable, but it must keep running hard to stay ahead. In other words, this is a moat that moves: durable for now, but only if management keeps deepening it faster than others can catch up.
Part 6 – Other Items
No “guru” ownership jumps out here. InPost doesn’t sit in the concentrated portfolios of well-known value or quality-focused fund managers – at least not in a way that’s publicly visible or materially above the 4% threshold I usually consider meaningful.
As of July 2025, InPost’s shareholder base remains anchored by three major investors. The largest is PPF Group N.V., which holds 28.75% of the company’s shares and voting rights. PPF, controlled by AMALAR Holding s.r.o., is a Czech investment group with a diverse portfolio spanning telecom, finance, and logistics assets across Europe.
The second-largest shareholder is A&R Investments Ltd, owning 12.49% of the shares – this vehicle represents Rafał Brzoska, InPost’s founder and CEO, and reflects his significant continuing influence on the company’s strategic direction. At the IPO, it was reported that Brzoska controlled ~13% (of which ~1% directly, remainder via the A&R vehicle) so his total stake is probably around 13.5%.
“There is also possible risk stemming from recent changes in the shareholder register, which has seen Advent reduce its stake from ~46% in early 2023 to ~11% at latest disclosure, with most of the shares sold being snapped up by PPF Holdings, which now holds ~29% of the company. While we were close enough to Advent’s team to appreciate the positive impact they had on InPost’s financial discipline and focus, we are still getting to know the people at PPF. PPF is a private investment group founded by the late Petr Kellner, a Czech billionaire who became hugely wealthy during the privatisation of formerly government-owned assets following the collapse of the Iron Curtain. Kellner died in a heli-skiing accident in Alaska in 2021, though PPF continues to be an active investor, and now has a stake that can clearly influence how InPost is run. Though we don’t see any particular risks stemming from their ownership, there’s always scope for very large shareholders pushing companies to do things that aren’t necessarily in the interests of other public shareholders.“ - Granular Capital
The third major investor is Advent International Corporation, one of the world’s largest private equity firms, which still holds 6.5% of InPost following its partial exit during earlier listing phases. The remaining 52.26% of shares are free float and owned by a mix of institutional and retail investors, reflecting InPost’s broadening ownership since its 2021 IPO on Euronext Amsterdam.
The fact that there is no “guru” shareholder isn’t a red flag, though. Many high-quality European mid-caps remain below the radar of global investors simply because of their size, liquidity, and listing venue. The stock’s limited presence on U.S. platforms and its domicile in Poland further narrow the audience of institutional owners. What I do notice in the filings is a healthy mix of long-only European funds and infrastructure-oriented investors who understand network economics. That’s a constructive shareholder base for a business that still requires patient capital.
There’s no activist investor currently involved, nor any public sign of agitation around governance or capital allocation. The shareholder structure is anchored by the founder, with meaningful free float held by institutional funds that prefer operational compounding over financial engineering. If an activist ever stepped in, it would likely be around balance-sheet optimization or capital returns once international capex moderates. At this stage, though, activist pressure would probably do more harm than good; the company’s strategy still hinges on controlled reinvestment rather than extraction.
As for dividends, InPost doesn’t pay one – and shouldn’t. The reinvestment runway is still wide, and returns on incremental capital remain well above what shareholders could earn from distributions. Management has been explicit that free cash flow in the next few years will go toward expansion and deleveraging, not payouts. That’s the right choice. When the network reaches saturation in several major markets, dividend discussions will make more sense, but until then, every retained zloty compounds faster inside the business than in investors’ accounts.
For dividend-focused investors, it’s still worth noting that Poland applies a standard 19% withholding tax on dividends to foreign shareholders, with reductions available under double-tax treaties. But that’s academic here since the stock currently offers no yield. If management eventually introduces a modest payout policy, the tax friction would be similar to other continental European equities – manageable but not trivial for cross-border investors.
In short, there’s no star manager endorsement, no activist overhang, and no dividend hook. This is a founder-led compounder still in its reinvestment phase. The shareholder mix reflects that reality: patient capital on board, short-term tourists largely absent.
Part 7 – Valuation
InPost’s Future Growth Trajectory – Where Could the Next Leg Come From?
When I think about InPost’s valuation setup, the first question is always where the next phase of growth will come from – and how much of it is already in the price.
Over the medium term, say three to five years, I expect growth to be driven primarily by the international rollout reaching operating maturity. Poland will continue compounding in the mid-single digits through parcel density gains, higher non-marketplace mix, and growing C2C and returns volumes, but the real lever sits abroad.
France and the UK are now in the stage where utilization and fixed-cost absorption drive profit growth faster than revenue growth. That’s classic operating leverage, and it should carry the group’s EBITDA upward.
And clearly, the company isn’t done yet in terms of its international expansion ambitions. I’ll point you to the TAM discussion again, where we discussed the runway ahead (“The total addressable market in UK, France, Italy, in Spain combined is 30 times more than we have currently in Poland. That’s the beauty of it. This is really a blue ocean we are focused on now.“). During Q2, management said they plan to grow the network by 15,000 APMs a year:
“We plan to accelerate deployment to c. 15,000 APMs across all markets. This includes ~3,000 APMs in Poland, ~4,000 APMs in Benefralux, ~4,500 APMs in the UK, ~2,000 in Iberia, ~2,000 in Italy.“
Beyond geographic scale, several secondary drivers will add layers to that growth. First of all, the company will continue to benefit from the secular tailwinds discussed (further ecommerce penetration, a growing preference for OOH delivery solutions, increasing urbanization), which are of course, contributing to the maybe 5% growth in annual parcel volume. Secondly, returns are a high-frequency, high-stickiness segment where InPost is rapidly gaining share, especially with fashion merchants. This mix shift toward returns raises both utilization and yield per parcel. Moreover, cross-border deliveries, where they want to be the low-cost disruptor, are another area with big future growth potential.
There’s also incremental pricing potential as density improves and service levels justify small, disciplined increases. Margins should expand gradually as the business shifts from rollout to optimization, and automation investments start reducing middle-mile and sorting costs. In other words, volume growth, margin expansion, and cost efficiency all work together here.
Longer term, the growth path will flatten but remain healthy. Once the locker grids in the UK and France hit mature density, InPost can continue compounding through software layers – loyalty integration, data services for merchants, and possible monetization of app traffic or advertising. These won’t move the needle immediately but could extend the runway once physical growth slows.
Material buybacks to boost per-share growth seem unlikely near term, given debt reduction priorities, but could become an additional per-share growth driver once leverage drops below management’s target band.
Temporary tailwinds have played some role in the recent acceleration. The rebound in European e-commerce volumes after a sluggish 2023 has helped the optics. Likewise, declining parcel competition in Poland – partly because weaker couriers exited the market – has made underlying growth look stronger. But those are short-term boosts. The core driver is still density-driven operating leverage, which doesn’t depend on cyclical demand swings.
A Simplistic Way to Think About Steady-State Margins
Before getting into the complexity of modeling and valuation, I like to start with something simple. What would InPost’s margins look like if its international businesses eventually resembled Poland? The Polish operation has been around the longest, is most mature, and arguably serves as a proxy for what “steady state” economics could look like once density and utilization improve elsewhere. So let’s do the math.
For the first half of 2025, Poland generated 3,362.9 million PLN in revenue and 1,118.4 million PLN in operating profit. That translates into roughly a 33% EBIT margin. Using an average exchange rate of about 4.3 PLN per euro, that’s around €782 million in revenue and €260 million in operating profit.
When I run the same exercise on the full-year 2024 numbers, I arrive at a very similar picture. Poland’s 2024 revenue was 6,325,6 million PLN and operating profit came in at 2040,7 million PLN. That’s a 32% margin. In FY223, the Polish EBIT margin was 31.5%.
Those margins are the result of scale, network density, and operational maturity.
And that’s the lens through which I look at the rest of the business. If the UK, France, and other European markets can inch their way toward similar economics over time – even if they never fully match them – it would have profound implications for the group’s long-term earnings power and, by extension, its valuation.
Valuing InPost on the Polish Business Alone
Sometimes it helps to strip the story down to its essence. What if we ignored the international operations for a moment and valued InPost purely on the basis of its Polish business – the engine that still generates the majority of profits?
As of the time I’m writing this, the company currently trades at a market cap of roughly €5 billion and an enterprise value of around €7 billion. Those are the numbers Koyfin displays, and I think they are directionally correct. Based on the most recent balance sheet (see part 4), the company reported total borrowings of PLN 5.8 billion and cash and equivalents of PLN 0.9 billion, resulting in net debt of approximately PLN 4.9 billion, or about €1.15 billion when converted at an exchange rate of 4.3 PLN per euro. In addition, lease liabilities, both short- and long-term, amount to PLN 3.46 billion, or roughly €0.8 billion, which are typically included in enterprise value calculations. Adjusting for the small non-controlling interest of PLN 18.6 million, the implied enterprise value comes out to roughly €7.0 billion.
Using those figures, I will just share some simple valuation multiples based on the Polish segment’s EBIT.
Starting with FY2024, Poland generated 2,040.7 million PLN in EBIT. Using an average exchange rate of 4.3 PLN per euro, that translates into approximately €475 million.
EV/EBIT (Poland, FY2024) = 7,000 / 475 = 14.7x
So, if you were to value only the Polish operation and completely ignore the international losses and growth optionality elsewhere, the core business trades at roughly 10–11x EBIT on a market cap basis and about 15x on an EV basis.
But InPost in still a fast-growing business, so really we should do the same exercise for the H1 2025 run rate. The Polish segment earned 1,118.4 million PLN in operating profit in just the first half. Annualizing that gives 2,236.8 million PLN, which equals roughly €520 million at the same 4.3 PLN/EUR rate.
For a business with a 30-plus percent margin profile, entrenched market position, and visible reinvestment runway, that doesn’t strike me as expensive. It’s a useful mental anchor because it highlights how much of today’s valuation is effectively supported by Poland alone. Everything else – the UK, France, the app ecosystem, and network expansion across Europe – is being valued at close to zero. And keep in mind that in Q2, more than 50% of the group’s revenue was actually generated OUTSIDE of Poland!
Valuing InPost on Steady-State Margins
Profitability at InPost scales beautifully with network density, parcel volume, and utilization. As the company captures more market share across Europe, there’s no structural reason why international operations couldn’t approach the Polish margin profile.
“As you look to the future, remember, we’ve always said that with the flywheel working that midterm, those international markets should get close to a 30% profit margin. And that is a trajectory that we are on. Now it will take a couple of years as we build volume. But the same strategy will apply. It’s B2C acceleration, it’s further deployment and converting and moving volume from to-door and PUDOs to APMs. And therefore, again, it’s a flywheel in motion. So we will continue to smartly invest. We’ve got a disciplined approach, whether it’s with M&A or organic on how to further deploy APMs, how to grow the business.
And yes, we expect in the next couple of years to keep on driving towards that 30% margin […] as we get more volume and as we get this flywheel really working as it has done in Poland. So we’ve always said that the end point is not 30%. Longer term, it might be higher. But again, the first midterm point would be closer to 30% […].“ - CFO on the Q4 24 Call
“We’ve given a clear update when we basically did the Yodle acquisition. And I’m just going to repeat what we said there. In Q2, it’s going to be a dilutive impact on the U.K. as of -- and we’re going to be a margin below 10% in the U.K. We expect for Q2, Q3 to go back to double-digit margin, and we will be accretive as of Q2 2026, which basically means that within 1 year, we will triple the profitability of the U.K. as become accretive. So now you can look from the numbers and the guidance that we’ve given that the EBITDA number for the full year is expected to be about 0, which means we go from a loss in Q2 to profitability to EBITDA profit in the second half of the year and that you can also read from the updated outlook that we’ve given. So that is the best I can give you at this point in time. But the key figure for us is within 12 months of the acquisition, we’ll be tripling profit and be accretive in the U.K. with the all acquisition.” Q1 25 Call
Competition may be tougher and labor costs higher in markets like France or the UK, but those factors are at least partly offset by the scale benefits that could come from tackling a much larger addressable market. If Poland can run at 33% EBIT margins in the first half of 2025, assuming the international markets eventually settle at around 25% margins feels somewhat reasonable in my view. So back to doing the math:
Starting with the Polish business, H1 2025 EBIT was 1,118.4 million PLN. Annualizing that gives 2,236.8 million PLN. Using the same 4.3 PLN per euro exchange rate, that equals roughly €520 million in annualized EBIT.
Now let’s estimate the potential for the international business under the steady-state margin assumption. In the same period (H1 2025), Eurozone revenue was 1,756.8 million PLN, and UK + Ireland revenue was 1,383.3 million PLN, for a combined 3,140.1 million PLN. Annualizing that gives 6,280.2 million PLN, or roughly €1.46 billion.
Applying a 25% EBIT margin on that revenue leads to 1,570.1 million PLN EBIT, which equals about €365 million.
Adding this to the Polish EBIT:
Poland EBIT (€520m) + International steady-state EBIT (€365m) = €885 million total EBIT.
With an enterprise value of €7 billion, the group would trade at:
EV/EBIT = 7,000 / 885 = 7.9x
So in summary, if you assume the rest of Europe eventually converges toward a 25% margin structure, InPost’s current valuation implies a 8x EBIT multiple on steady-state earnings power.
That’s the kind of multiple usually reserved for businesses with little to no growth – not for one compounding double digits, expanding its network, and deepening its moat with every parcel shipped.
Framing the Upside and Downside Based on Future Growth
To bring all of this together, I ran a simple scenario analysis that models three possible paths for InPost over the next five years – a bull, a base, and a bear case. In each scenario, I start with the current fundamentals as of H1 2025: annualized revenue of roughly €3.0 billion and annualized EBIT of about €392 million, equivalent to a 13% group EBIT margin. The differences between the cases stem from three key assumptions: topline growth (revenue CAGR), margin expansion potential, and exit multiple.
In the bull case, I assume InPost continues to compound revenue at 15% annually (23% in FY26, 18% in FY27, and a further slowdown from there), while margins expand from 13% to 25% as international operations scale and utilization improves. The market recognizes the quality of this earnings power, re-rating the stock to a 22x EBIT multiple. Under these assumptions, operating profit grows to roughly €1.5 billion after five years, resulting in an overall 36.6% annualized return. This is the “network flywheel fully spins” case – one where density, pricing, and efficiency gains all converge to create a structurally advantaged logistics platform across Europe.
In the base case, revenue compounds at 13% per year (which feels conservative to be fair), margins climb more modestly from 13% to 20%, and the valuation multiple stays flat at around 17.8x EBIT. That combination results in operating profit of roughly €1.1 billion by year five and an expected annualized return of about 23%. It’s a balanced view that assumes solid execution without heroics – Poland remains dominant, international markets become more profitable and drive growth.
In the bear case, the picture is more muted. Revenue growth slows to just under 12% annualized over five years, margins improve only slightly from the current level to 17%, and the market de-rates the stock to a 13x multiple as competition bites and expansion stalls, or maybe the market is just not excited about InPost at that time. Even under those conditions, profits still grow to roughly €0.9 billion, translating to a 10.5% annualized stock return. In other words, the downside is not catastrophic – just mediocre compounding.
Weighting those scenarios by probability – 30% for the bull case, 50% for the base case, and 20% for the bear case – yields an expected annual return of around 25%. That’s a high hurdle for any business, and it underscores how much leverage there is in InPost’s model once scale and efficiency kick in. At today’s valuation, the market seems to be pricing in something closer to the bear case, leaving ample room for positive surprises if management executes on even a moderate version of the growth and margin expansion trajectory I’ve outlined above.
Valuation Appendix
I didn’t get into valuing InPost on a cash flow basis. I’ll attach one slide from the recent investor presentation and one comment from the Q2 call:
“Our CapEx is primarily geared towards strategic investments in our APM network, representing over 70% of Q2 CapEx.“ - Q2 25 Call
I’ll also attach the outlook management gave in Q2:
Next, a comparison to some of the incumbents:
Finally, one thought I also had when thinking about InPost’s valuation was whether the useful life of APMs might be longer than the depreciation period used when calculating account profits, resulting in current accounting profits potentially understating the “true” long-term earnings power (this idea may ring a bell for those who read my Ashtead Technology analysis). But considering that management recently extended to depreciation period to 15 years, I don’t think that’s the case here.
“Of course, as we’ve been expanding lockers over the last number of years, we looked at the lifetime. We clearly see that the lockers we have in place in terms of technology and robustness basically have a longer lifetime than what originally was expected. So their lifetime was changed to 15-year lifetime depreciation. That happened last year in quarter 3.“ Q3 24 Call
Why Does This Opportunity Exist?
As for why this opportunity exists, I believe the stock remains discounted because many investors are still anchored on the narrative of “great in Poland, questionable abroad.”
Integration noise, a good bit of leverage, the Allegro dispute, and a few years of uneven free cash flow have reinforced that perception.
The market still values InPost like a mid-tier regional courier rather than a pan-European logistics platform. The disconnect, in my view, is temporary. The fundamental issues – underutilization abroad and elevated capex – are transitional, not permanent. As those headwinds fade over the next one to three years, the optics on margins and cash conversion should improve, and the multiple will likely follow.
Finally, insider behavior supports that view. Recent filings show small but consistent insider purchases rather than sales (the €6 million purchase of Brzoska in April stands out), and no large disposals by senior management. The founder’s stake remains substantial, signaling long-term alignment. There’s no sign of insiders treating the current valuation as expensive – which, if anything, reinforces my sense that they still view the stock as undervalued relative to its normalized earnings power.
Conclusion
InPost’s story is one of patient compounding disguised as a logistics business, which many investors immediately put into the “unattractive industry” bucket. At first glance, it looks like another (low margin) parcel delivery operator with regional ambitions, but underneath sits a differentiated network model that combines physical infrastructure with habit-forming consumer behavior that posts very attractive economics.
The company’s moat isn’t based on branding or regulation – it’s grounded in scale, data, and convenience. Each new locker improves route density, reduces cost per parcel, and the overall flywheel discussed in this post reinforces why merchants and consumers keep coming back.
The last few years have been about building, not harvesting. That’s why the financials still look uneven. In fact, I hope management remains ambitious and keeps deploying incremental capital at attractive rates.
Free cash flow conversion is temporarily low, margins outside Poland lag, and leverage is higher than ideal. Yet those are predictable symptoms of expansion, not red flags.
The Polish business proves what the model looks like at maturity – stable high margins, strong cash generation, strong defensibility, and somewhat limited maintenance capex. The rest of Europe is slowly following the same trajectory. France and the UK are now showing the first glimpses of operating leverage that can compound for a decade, considering the size of the TAM if execution stays disciplined.
The market remains divided. Some investors still see a heavily indebted regional courier chasing international dreams. Others recognize a network asset that will be very hard to replicate once scale is achieved. The truth probably lies somewhere between those extremes – a well-run infrastructure company still in the middle innings of its growth phase. For me, the appeal lies in that disconnect. The fear that international expansion won’t deliver has kept valuation grounded, while the underlying economics keep improving.
Disclaimer: I own InPost shares. The analysis presented in this blog may be flawed and/or critical information may have been overlooked. The content provided should be considered an educational resource and should not be construed as individualized investment advice, nor as a recommendation to buy or sell specific securities. I may own some of the securities discussed. The stocks, funds, and assets discussed are examples only and may not be appropriate for your individual circumstances. It is the responsibility of the reader to do their own due diligence before investing in any index fund, ETF, asset, or stock mentioned or before making any sell decisions. Also double-check if the comments made are accurate. You should always consult with a financial advisor before purchasing a specific stock and making decisions regarding your portfolio.
