French post office takes controlling share of German delivery firm
French post office takes controlling share of German delivery firm
Updated 11:56 a.m. ET, Thu Feb 15, 2001
BY BRUCE BARNARD
JoC ONLINE
LONDON –La Poste, France’s state mail monopoly, has taken control of Deutscher Paket Dienst (DPD), Germany’s second largest parcel delivery firm, in the latest move aimed at keeping pace with its main European rivals, TPG of the Netherlands and Germany’s Deutsche Post World Net, which have become global logistics players.
La Poste’s logistics and parcels unit, GeoPost, has agreed to buy a 35 percent stake in DPD from Frankfurter Kreis, a consortium of six German freight forwarders, taking its holding to 84.8 percent.
La Poste did not disclose the value of the deal, but industry sources said it paid around 420 million euros ($385 million).
Martin Vial, La Poste’s chairman, said the DPD acquisition, the company’s biggest deal outside France, was “a key step in our international development. “The aim, he said, is to transform La Poste into “a powerful group on a European scale, and this relates particularly to parcels and logistics.”
The deal marks a victory for La Poste over Britain’s Post Office, whose German unit, German Parcel acquired a 10 percent stake in DPD last summer which it was expected to use to build a bigger holding and prevent its French rival from taking control of the parcel firm. It is now expected to dispose of the holding following the GeoPost transaction.
La Poste beefed up its pan-European network in 2000 with the $295 million acquisition of Parceline and Interlink Express, the parcel delivery units of Australia’s Mayne Nickless.
Vial said La Poste wants to accelerate talks to sell stakes in GeoPost to the Spanish and Italian post offices and is also mulling taking a stake in the Greek post office which is being partially privatized by the Athens government.
Separately, the Post Office’s pds300 million ($435 million) acquisition of German Parcel, Germany’s fourth largest parcel firm, in December 1999 came under fire from an influential parliamentary committee which accused top civil servants of rushing through the deals. MPs were told that a planned pds20 million purchase of a delivery hub in Germany escalated in nine months to a full-fledged takeover bid in a race to beat new German tax laws.
Alan Campbell, a member of the committee, said the deal was a “huge risk” involving 24 foreign franchisees.
But Post Office chief executive John Roberts told the committee the company is “very satisfied” with the acquisition which encountered competition in the British market from Deutsche Post and La Poste.All the German franchisees are still with the company, he said.
