German publishers interested in Sunday deliveries of Deutsche Post
German magazine and newspaper publishers are interested in the plans of Deutsche Post, the German postal service operator, to begin delivering on Sundays. The company has announced plans for a pilot project together with the publishers of ‘Spiegel’, the German weekly news magazine; the pilot phase, which will last for three months, is to begin in Dusseldorf on June 3 and in Hamburg on August 19. Around 30,000 copies of the magazine are expected to be delivered. If the pilot phase is successful, the project will then be extended to the whole of Germany.
German publishing group Burda says that it will have its magazine ‘Focus’, the closest rival of ‘Spiegel’, delivered on Sundays if Deutsche Post decides to make these services permanent. The publishers of German daily newspaper ‘Suddeutsche Zeitung’, who are considering the launch of a Sunday edition, are also interested. German publisher Axel Springer Verlag, which currently has a virtual monopoly on the market for Sunday deliveries, says that it intends to defend its position on the market.
