Interview with Geodis Chairman and CEO – Pierre Blayau
Interview with Geodis Chairman and CEO – Pierre Blayau
Read MoreYear: 2007
Poste Italiane plans cellphone service
Poste Italiane said Monday that it would begin selling mobile phone services by the end of the year as it aims for a slice of one of the world’s most lucrative, yet saturated, markets.
Poste Italiane, which plans to sell the services in partnership with one of the country’s four existing cellphone operators, will pay a fee to use their infrastructure as it sets up what is known as a mobile virtual network operator. The company aims to have two million clients five years after the service has been introduced, the Poste chief executive, Massimo Sarmi, said at a presentation. He declined to say which of the existing Italian operators he expected to sign the accord.
To grab new clients, Poste plans to leverage its 14,000 branches, which reach into every corner of Italy, Sarmi said. About 1.5 million people enter an Italian post office every day, and the company has a successful banking business with 20 million clients – holders of bank accounts, credit cards or prepaid cards that could be directly linked to pay for cellphone services.
Virtual operators have existed in the United States and Europe for several years, including Virgin Mobile in Britain, Yoigo in Spain and Beyond Mobile in the United States. But most have failed to make a significant impact on the market. The two exceptions are Denmark and Germany, where virtual operators like Debitel have carved out more than 20 percent of the market, according to a Poste Italiane document.
Poste Italiane also said Monday that 2006 net income almost doubled to EUR676 million, or USD900 million, from EUR349 million, while sales rose EUR600 million, or 3.5 percent, to EUR17.1 billion.
Read MoreChristian Salvesen – More growth and profits
Christian Salvesen – More growth and profits
Read MoreLa 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.
Read MoreYour identity, lying on the doorstep
Would-be identity thieves no longer need bother rifling through dirty rubbish sacks. A major credit reference agency is linked to a promotion that is encouraging householders to leave personal data, including their dates of birth, in unsealed plastic bags on their front doorsteps.
Take one of these bags – brightly coloured, for extra visibility – and you could find out the names of the people living at the house, their mobile and home phone numbers, their monthly credit card balances, their occupations and salary levels, the problems they may have in paying back loans, and even the birthdays of their children. These, and many other equally intimate subjects, are included in the latest Household Insight Survey, which is being distributed across the country. The survey comes with a letter to householders that tells them to ‘simply leave your completed survey in the bag provided on your doorstep’.
‘Any criminal with a little bit of intelligence could walk down the street during darkness and gain an unhealthy amount of information about a lot of people,’ says Michael Blakemore, whose own street in Durham was targeted for the promotion earlier this month. ‘This way of collecting data is seriously risking identity theft.’
The Household Insight Survey, a questionnaire that encourages the public to voluntarily divulge personal information for marketing purposes, is operated by a subsidiary of TNT Post, the Dutch-based postal operator. TNT Post in turn supplies the data to a number of companies, including the market research and credit reference agency Experian.
Read MoreDHL UAE promotes natural gas fleet
Under the slogan “we travel naturally”, DHL has announced its plans to add compressed natural gas powered vans (CNGs) to its UAE express delivery fleet.
With natural gas continuing to develop as an alternative fuel of choice, and a forecast of 20 per cent natural gas share of road traffic fuel consumption in the UAE by 2012, the express and logistics leader is putting two environmentally-friendly units through a pilot testing phase as part of a plan to expand its UAE natural gas fleet in the coming years.
DHL UAE was recently upgraded to ISO 14001 accreditation, the internationally recognised standard for Environmental Management Systems (EMS), after continuous extensive improvements.
Developments included advanced staff training to raise environmental awareness, as well as publishing DHL’s environmental policy as part of the parent company DPWN’s first sustainability report in June 2006, setting clear environmental objectives and targets.
Gasoline and diesel powered vehicles contribute to 80pc of environment pollution in the UAE followed by factories, a recent study conducted by the Strategic Planning Department for Transport at the Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) in Dubai revealed.
Israeli Post office on the way to stock market
The Postal Authority is on its way to the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange sometime in the next few months. In recent days the Government Companies Authority (GCA) presented a draft of a proposed law to privatize the Postal Authority, including the Postal Bank.
The draft bill was sent for comment to the relevant bodies: the Finance, Communications and Justice ministries; as well as the treasury’s accountant general and also the Shin Bet Security Service.
The Ministerial Committee on Legislation is expected to vote on the proposed law after committee approval. The GCA will prepare a prospectus for the issue. According to the proposal, the state will sell 49 percent of the shares by May 2008. In the second stage the state will sell control of the Postal Authority to a strategic investor, who will commit to integrating the post office’s infrastructure into the banking system – and thereby compete with the large banks.
At the same time, a special team, lead by Accountant General Yaron Zelekha, is examining interest in the purchase. The group has met over the past few months with several local and foreign institutions that have shown interest, including the Deutsche Post, a number of insurance companies and medium-sized banks.
Read MoreRivals call for Royal Mail to slash charges
Royal Mail could be forced by the industry regulator to cut the price of delivering rivals’ letters for the ‘final mile’ a move it claims could be crippling.
At present, Royal Mail charges private competitors 13p a letter to deliver them in the final mile.
Typically, private companies collect mail from large business customers, sort it and take it to Royal Mail sorting offices nearest the postal address for delivery.
But TNT Post, Royal Mail’s biggest competitor, has appealed to Postcomm to force Royal Mail to cut its charges because it says they are so high that competitors are being ‘squeezed out of the market’.
Royal Mail, however, wants the regulator to allow a rise in the 13p charge, saying the fee is too low and preventing it from being able to compete effectively.
Postcomm will examine the rival claims and give a verdict in six months.
But it is already clear that the regulator does not believe that competition is harming Royal Mail and it believes the company is simply trying to protect its monopoly position.
Even though 2.5 billion business letters are being collected by its competitors, the regulator says that the 13p charge for delivering them more than covers Royal Mail’s costs.
Royal Mail says an adverse decision by the regulator could cripple its business, which has already been hit by the ‘loss’ of 2.5 billion business letters, one in eight, to private competition in the past 12 months.
Royal Mail is concerned that this haemorrhage will accelerate as the private postal companies cherry-pick its biggest business customers.
Earlier this month, Postcomm chairman Nigel Stapleton said: ‘Royal Mail is using an attack on the regulatory structure as a smokescreen for its own lack of progress in tackling high labour costs.
‘Since single daily delivery was introduced in 2004, every initiative that the company has taken to improve efficiency has been absorbed either by higher wage rates or increased pension costs.’
Read MoreMER Magazine
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