German DPWN to face competition from Direkt Express
Deutsche Post World Net AG will face competition from Direkt Express in the market for collecting, sorting and franking commercial letters that weigh less than 100 grammes starting next month, Focus Online reported. A German court decision opened the market for such letters earlier this month. ‘We will deliver 120,000 mailings per day,’ Direkt Express’s chief executive Edip Tuerkoglu told Focus Online. Direkt Express will be Deutsche Post’s first competitor in this market.
German News http://www.germnews.de/archive/dn/2005/05/04.html#11 5/5/05
Private postal service to create 500 new jobs in Ulm
The private postal service company DirektExpress hopes to create five hundred new jobs in Ulm. Across the country, the company is talking about a total of five thousand jobs, as, for example, it seeks couriers and transport companies willing to work partly on a commission basis. The Ulm-based company is the first postal service in Germany to work with the German post office (“Deutsche Post AG”) in regular letter-mail delivery. DirektExpress will, in future, collect regular mail from businesses and government offices across Germany for free, pre-sort it, and then deliver it in bundles to the post office. The company will enjoy a volume discount, which it will in turn pass on, in part, to its customers, in the form of cheaper postage. DirektExpress says that customers can save between three and seven percent in postage, in addition to no longer needed to take their mail to the post office themselves. The offer is of interest primarily to small and medium-sized businesses that otherwise would not be eligible for a discount from the post office. The company claims to have a customer base of approximately a thousand businesses and government offices already, primarily delivering forms for courts, tax offices, or city administrations. The company’s business model became possible through a decision by the Federal Cartel Office, requiring the Deutsche Post to allow competitors access and discounts in areas such as receiving, pre-sorting, and submitting for delivery letters weighing under 100 grams. [Heavier letters and packages had already been opened to competition.]
