The week that was: 14 December, 2012
Summing up the biggest stories of the week on Post&Parcel, with Honeywell announcing plans to buy Intermec, and a postal bill unveiled in the Netherlands…
Honeywell to buy Intermec for $600m in cash
Technology giant Honeywell is set to buy scanning and mobile computing specialist Intermec, after having a $600m offer accepted, subject to shareholder approval.
The company said it believed the purchase, for around 10 times the value of Intermec’s pre-tax earnings for the 12 months up to the end of September, would boost the scale of its rugged mobile computing device business.
Honeywell said that subject to Intermec shareholder approval and regulatory reviews, it believed the deal could close by the end of the second quarter 2013.
Brazil, Russia, China only major mail markets showing growth
Mail volumes have fallen by 18% in the world’s 17 major markets since 2006, most rapidly in the UK, Italy, Spain and North America.
The finding came within a new report from the UK’s postal regulator, Ofcom, which uses UPU figures to chart international mail trends from 2006 to 2011 among countries most comparable to the UK.
While mail volumes grew slightly in recent years within emerging economies of Brazil, Russia and China, among the world’s other major mail markets volumes fell by 67bn items between 2006 and 2011.
Dutch regulator to get powers to boost competition
Ministers in the Netherlands introduced new postal legislation that would allow the country’s postal regulator, the OPTA, to intervene in the market much earlier in the event that mail businesses face unfair competition.
At the moment, the OPTA can only take action against national postal service PostNL when there have been complaints from rivals about an abuse of PostNL’s dominant position in the market.
The new proposals would allow the regulator to step in to set preventive measures before unfair competition arises. And, it would mean the OPTA can launch an investigation based on mere suspicions that a company like PostNL is offering postal services below cost in order to grab a larger market share.
