Dutch group looks to hire rival force of British postmen

PETER Bakker, head of the Dutch post office, said yesterday that the company is considering hiring its own force of postmen to compete head on with Royal Mail.

The company, TPG, trades as TNT Mail in the UK, and already delivers heavier mail door-to-door using Express Dairies. Mr Bakker said that although replicating Royal Mail’s entire network was “not viable”, hiring large numbers of postmen was “one of the models” TNT was looking at in the UK.

He expected there would be “one or two companies with competing networks to Royal Mail” after the mail market was fully opened up to competition.

Royal Mail would still maintain its leading position, but he saw no reason why TNT Mail could not have between 10pc and 15pc of the UK mail market. “We have the capability to succeed,” he said.

Mr Bakker is looking at an “end to end” delivery strategy that doesn’t use the Royal Mail’s access agreement which TNT Mail uses at the moment.

It allows TNT to use the final mile of Royal Mail’s delivery network – the postmen – for a fixed fee. The company has clients such as Next and Lloyds TSB for this service and revealed yesterday that it was in talks with some government departments about handling their mail also using the access agreement.

Mr Bakker said that the end-to-end strategy would be more rewarding for TNT in the long term, and that the UK business expected to have a plan in place on how to achieve its aims by the end of the next 12 months. It emerged in 2002 that TPG and Royal Mail had been in talks about a possible merger.

Mr Bakker said he thought that the Royal Mail management had “done a good job” in bringing the group back to financial health.