Deutsche Post to cut 3,000 mail delivery jobs
Deutsche Post, Europe’s largest postal services group, announced on Tuesday it would cut 3,000 jobs in its mail delivery unit by early next year.
The move was widely perceived as an attempt to accelerate cost savings in the division that is Deutsche Post’s largest and most profitable, but which analysts say has the lowest potential for growth.
The group depends on mail delivery for 74 per cent of its profits, and industry experts said Klaus Zumwinkel, the chairman, had come under pressure to improve the unit’s performance.
“The margins of that division were at the lower end of the target range,” said one analyst.
Despite Mr Zumwinkel’s efforts to transform the former state monopoly into a global logistics giant, Deutsche Post’s dependency on mail delivery for the bulk of its profits is likely to continue in the coming years. Only last month the German parliament voted in favour of extending the group’s letter monopoly to 2007.
The company said the cuts would not come through compulsory redundancies but rather through not replacing workers retiring or leaving the group.
Yesterday’s announcement came less than two months after Deutsche Post said it would cut 8,000 jobs in its transport unit by 2004 with savings of E100m ($85.3m) per year.
Deutsche Post said it was unable to calculate the savings that would be generated by the cuts announced on Tuesday.
A spokesman for the group said the cuts had been enabled by investments in letter sorting technologies at its local letter centres, that would allow postmen to spend more time actually delivering letters.
That investment had come on top of the E4bn that Deutsche Post spent on beefing up the technology of its regional letter centres over the past decade.
Financial Times
