Tag: Deutsche Post

Deutsche Post AG CEO Klaus Zumwinkel reaffirmed the company’s full year earnings forecasts, and said he expects the state to sell off all its remaining holdings in the company in the medium term. Zumwinkel told the annual meeting that the company is sticking to its forecast of full year EBIT of at least 3.6 bln eur and a rise in net profit of 500 mln eur. Shareholders ‘will benefit (from an increase on) our 2004 earnings per share (of an estimated) 30 pct,’ he added. Zumwinkel said he expects the government and state-owned development bank Kreditanstalt fuer Wiederaufbau (KfW) to sell all of their shares in Deutsche Post in the ‘mid-term’, without giving a specific timeframe. ‘A reduction in the government’s holding to below 50 pct would be an important step in terms of market psychology… We expect that the complete privatization of our company … will be concluded in the mid-term. That is the goal in any case,’ he said.

The German Postal Service has concluded first agreements with small companies regarding mail deliveries. This will help realising the decree of the Federal Cartel Office to open up the market, the company said in Bonn. The Cartel Office has ordered the Postal Service to allow competitors regarding tasks like pick-up, pre-sorting and delivery of letters under 100 grams.

Deutsche Post, Europe’s largest postal service, has come under fire from lawyers and investors after the group prematurely issued analysts with operating figures ahead of its quarterly report next Monday.

A spokesperson for the German financial supervisory authority said that it would wait until the official figures are published on Monday, after reports in FT Deutschland, before they decided whether to take action against the company.

Lawyers told FT Deutschland, the Financial Times sister paper, that they believed the distribution of actual figures to analysts was a breach of German law.

“At a first glance what Deutsche Post has done is illegal. Market sensitive information has to be reported because it is information that can move the markets,” Klaus Rotter, an investment specialist said.