Deutsche Post shares slump amid DHL concerns
Deutsche Post on Wednesday abandoned its break-even target for its struggling DHL package delivery arm in the US and said it would stop reporting separate results for the unit. The news led to a substantial sell-off of the stock. The German postal group, the world’s largest logistics company, has been plagued by problems, particularly over service levels, following its acquisitions of DHL and Airborne, a Seattle-based delivery company bought for USD1bn in 2002. It had promised to break even in the US by the last quarter of this year but on Wednesday it merely said that “[DHL] will continue its path towards break-even in the coming years”. It also said it would no longer break results down geographically because none of its rivals, such as FedEx and UPS, did. Shares in the German group, which loses its domestic postal monopoly next year and has been seeking to expand abroad to compensate, plunged 3.6 per cent, making them the biggest losers among Frankfurt’s blue-chip stocks. “If people were being mean, they could argue that Deutsche Post wants to hide the progress of the US operations,” said one German-based analyst. “It is definitely not an encouraging sign.”
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