Postal organisations battle to get clearance for joint venture plans

Three postal organisations seeking to establish joint venture operations in the international mail sector have submitted new proposals to a European Commission (EC) body that is investigating their plans.

The post offices are hoping to get an EC decision on the issue by the end of this month, although some postal industry observers believe they have already had to make a number of concessions in order to try and secure regulatory clearance.

TNT Post Group (TPG) of the Netherlands, the UK Post Office and Singapore Post first announced their intention to establish two global mail joint ventures early last year and officially signed an agreement covering that project in July.

Subsequently, though, the EC decided it wanted to look into those plans, citing serious concerns that the proposed ventures could lead to “the creation or a strengthening of a dominant position in the outbound cross-border mail market in the UK and in the Netherlands” (the-chain, November 17).

Elaborating on the issue at the time its investigation was first announced, the EC pointed out that in addition to the postal operators, outbound cross-border business mail services were also offered by consolidators. The latter, it explained, collected and grouped outbound cross-border mail to a specific destination and subsequently negotiated a special rate with the public postal operators with which they choose to co-operate in order to distribute the “consolidated” mail in the country of destination. Through the planned joint venture developments, claimed the EC, one of the main public postal operators available to consolidators in the UK and the Netherlands would be removed.

To investigate those concerns, the EC formed a merger task force last October. The following month, the EC decided that body needed to look into the issue in more depth and extended the period of investigation – and therefore the timing of a decision – by a further four months.

According to a statement issued yesterday (February 28) by TPG, the latest stage of that process saw the three postal organisations submit a number of commitments relating to their joint venture plans to the EC merger task force earlier this week. “The partners are now waiting for the decision of the commission towards the end of March,” it adds.