Workers at an express delivery company's grid warehouse sort parcels on an intelligent express delivery line in Xinghua, East China's Jiangsu Province on May 20, 2026. Data released by the State Post Bureau shows that from January to April, the postal industry handled 70.16 billion parcels, a year-on-year increase of 4.1 percent. Among them, express delivery volume reached 64.57 billion parcels, a year-on-year increase of 5.1 percent. Photo: VCG

China has built the world's largest postal and express delivery network, with the widest coverage and the largest number of users, the State Post Bureau announced on Friday, World Post Day. China's annual per capita express delivery usage now exceeds 140 items.

China has continued to expand network coverage in recent years, with hub clusters in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, the Yangtze River Delta, the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, the Chengdu-Chongqing region and the Central China city cluster basically taking shape.

Relying on a model utilizing hubs, corridors and networks, more than 6,300 parcels enter the country's delivery channels every second. That translates into a daily parcel-handling volume of 540 million. The average end-to-end delivery time has continued to shorten and user satisfaction has continued to rise, data from the SPB showed.

The country's postal network expansion has seen notable progress in the rural areas in recent years. Express delivery to villages has been achieved with postal services serving as a backstop in a total of 2,939 villages in 17 pilot counties in central and western China. Over 81 percent of villages have established village-level comprehensive delivery and logistics service stations.

The postal and express delivery industry has actively served modern agriculture and advanced manufacturing, helping local specialties such as coffee from Southwest China's Yunnan Province and apples from Yan'an in Northwest China's Shaanxi Province leave the fields and reach broader markets.

The country's express delivery channels carry more than 30 billion yuan ($4.48 billion) worth of goods in circulation every day, helping build a modern circulation system featuring optimized resource allocation and smooth production-sales relations.

Liu Jiang, director of the strategic planning research department of the development research center of the SPB, was cited by CCTV News on Friday as saying that China's economy has maintained overall stability and continued to upgrade, the potential of the domestic consumer market is being continuously unleashed, providing a solid demand foundation for the continued expansion of the postal and express delivery market.

The postal and express delivery industry is making comprehensive efforts from rural areas to factories and from domestic to overseas markets, taking new steps in promoting high-quality development of the industry, the official said.

Sun Chuanwang, a professor at the School of Economics at Xiamen University, told the Global Times on Friday that a layered logistics network and China's super-sized market have effectively driven down the costs of express delivery service, and the inclusive growth happening in the country's rural areas has given the sector a unique advantage in cost performance, making the country the global leader.

Meanwhile, state-owned, private, and foreign-invested logistics enterprises are all participating in the business, while new business forms such as e-commerce logistics, on-demand delivery, and smart last-mile services continue to emerge, promoting the substantial growth of express delivery services in both urban and rural areas, Sun said.

China's postal industry processed 216.5 billion delivery items in 2025, an increase of 11.5 percent year-on-year, the Xinhua News Agency reported in January, citing SPB data.

The courier sector alone handled 199 billion parcels, marking a 13.7 percent growth from 2024.