La Poste focuses strategy

The French post office is adjusting its strategy and will once again concentrate on its core business — carrying letters. It is planning to sell its subsidiary Europe Airpost to South Africa’s Imperial Holdings.

The history of airmail in France started in the pioneering twenties of the last century, with the legendary company Adropostale and pilots such as Mermoz and Saint-Exupéry. But the French post office La Poste does not seem to be particularly interested in this tradition. It is planning to sell its air transport subsidiary Europe Airpost — which was known by the name Aeropostale until the year 2000 — to South Africa’s Imperial Holdings, owner of the airline Safair, this semester. Jean-Paul Bailly, La Poste’s president, explained that the company will focus on transporting letters by rail in future. In this context he pointed out that, together with state.owned rail operator SNCF, La Poste has plans to establish a network of postal TGV trains between France’s major conurbations, with links to the most important centres of trade and industry in neighbouring countries too.

The Imperial Holdings conglomerate has been a French post office partner for many years now. Its Irish subsidiary Air Contractors leases two Airbus A300s to Europe Airpost. Imperial, which generated sales of EUR 6 billion last year, is not only the sole shareholder of Safair, founded in 1963, but also holds stakes in banks and insurance companies, travel agencies and hotels, and various transport and logistics enterprises.

More passenger than airmail airline

Airmail company Europe Airpost employs a staff of 400 and owns 25 aircraft, twelve ofwhich are Boeing B737-300QCs (quick change). These can be converted from passenger to freighter aircraft in 20 minutes, enabling them to carry up to 18.8 t of airmail or newspapers by night, and tourists on charter flights by day. Europe Airpost has been a sub-contractor to no-frills airline FlyWest since 2005, deploying some aircraft on domestic services between Paris Roissy and both Brest and Toulon.

Europe Airpost is moving ever further away from the airmail business. Most of its flights are accounted for by charter and scheduled passenger services nowadays. It is these operations that yield the largest proportion of the enterprise’s gross profits, which stood at approximately EUR 15 million last year, on the back of EUR 240 million in sales. This makes Europe Airpost one of the few subsidiaries of the French post office that make a profit. Market observers are of the opinion that Europe Airpost will require massive investments very soon, however, for fleet renewal and expansion (by around a dozen aircraft) — an outlay La Poste is not willing or able to make.

Europe Airpost’s predecessor until 2000 was Aéropostale, a joint venture between La Poste and Air France, which was still the state-owned flag carrier at the time. The latter left the joint venture, taking a part of the fleet with it, as one of the measures preparing it for pnvatisation.