Australia Post’s chief executive has signalled more post offices in Sydney and Melbourne will close in the coming years as he focuses on speedier parcel delivery and attempts to stem losses from its letters business amid a decline in snail mail and foot traffic.

Cyber Monday, Black Friday and Christmas sales led to a record number of nearly 100 million parcels delivered across Australia in the six months to December, driving a 42.4 per cent lift in Australia Post’s interim net profit to $33.6 million. Revenue from the parcels and services business lifted 1.3 per cent to $3.9 billion, but its ailing letters business recorded losses of $182.1 million.

Chief executive Paul Graham said the retail store footprint of 4271 would be “slightly smaller” by the end of the financial year, pointing to a high concentration of post offices in certain metropolitan areas such as Melbourne’s Brunswick and Sydney’s Darlinghurst, where there are more than 70 post offices within a 7.5-kilometre radius.

“They’re the two [cities] that have significant overlap, built up over many, many decades,” Graham said.

“We appreciate people get quite attached to their local post office and quite emotional when that change occurs, but that change is occurring because people are simply not visiting the post office as much as they used to.

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“They’re not doing transactions over the counter, they’ve gone online, and obviously, they’re looking at different ways of accessing those services.”

As of this year, Australia Post ceased daily letter delivery and delivers ordinary mail and unaddressed letters every second day in some metro areas. Parcels, express, and priority mail are still delivered every business day.

Residents are now receiving two letters a week on average, with the parcel service describing the decline as “unstoppable”. Over the past 12 months alone, letter volumes have declined by 11.9 per cent. Over-the-counter transactions slid 4.1 per cent over the half.