The Argentine government has rescinded a concession to run the country’s post office, held since 1997 by a group led by tycoon Franco Macri, and set a 180-day period to re-privatize the service through a new tender.
The contract was rescinded by order of President Nestor Kirchner, officials said.
Read MorePostcomm, the postal regulator, has warned Royal Mail not to resist further liberalisation of the mail market, while a survey of business customers complained that the quality of the postal operator’s service had deteriorated.
The regulator is expected to make a decision on the thorny issue of access charges, the price private mail companies will pay to use parts of Royal Mail’s network. Postcomm this year proposed that Royal Mail charge rivals 11.5p for each letter in the lightest bracket but the company complained this would lead to substantial losses.
Read MoreRoyal Mail have announced that, at the suggestion of Postwatch, the consumer body for postal services, it plans to make a donation of £1 million towards London’s bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games. The donation is an apology for the recent disruption to postal services.
Read MoreTNT Logistics announced that its Italian unit has signed two major contracts.
The first one, with T.R.S. Evolution S.p.A., a division of the Trussardi Group, marks TNT’s debut in Italy’s luxury goods sector. Trussardi produces bags, suitcases, small leather goods and clothing. TNT also received a contract from Giochi Preziosi, a toy producer, to provide logistics management for all of its products.
Gist profits and revenues see strong growth
Read MoreFedEx Express, a unit of FedEx Corp, has launched a five times a week Hong Kong-Paris service, with refueling stops in Almaty, Kazakhstan.
The new service provides customers from mainland China the convenience of second working day delivery of items to major European destinations, FedEx said.
Read MoreDeutsche Post, the German postal and logistics group, is aiming for the loss-making US business of DHL, its express delivery subsidiary, to achieve a return of at least 4% in a few years’ time. It is hoping for a secure third position on the US express delivery market, behind the two market leaders FedEx and UPS, and, with this aim in mind, it invested €1.05bn in the acquisition of the US company Airborne, which, alone, already ranked third on the US market having achieved turnover of €3.34bn last year. Synergies between Airborne and DHL will be targeted as a step towards improving profitability.
Read MoreJapan Post, a public corporation created in April to take over the Postal Services Agency’s postal, savings and life insurance services, has been trying to introduce a production management system used by the Toyota group to streamline the postal services.
However, the system has yet to result in an ideal post office, and some employees are perplexed by the new system. It remains to be seen whether the system will be effective as a method of postal reform.
This autumn, Japan Post distributed to its branch offices 200-page manuals describing how Koshigaya Post Office in Koshigaya, Saitama Prefecture, had introduced the Toyota-style system, known as the kanban, or just-in-time inventory system.
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