Austrian Finance Minister Karl-Heinz Grasser said he was in favour of an initial public offering (IPO) of Austrian state-owned postal company Oesterreichische Post AG by the end of March 2006, in an interview with regional daily Tiroler Tageszeitung (TT), January 28, 2006 edition. Under initial plans, the IPO was to be carried in April or May 2006.
Read MoreThe finance director of Business Post Group PLC said it will take a year before there is a ‘significant improvement’ in the mail company’s struggling parcel business. In an interview with AFX News, Peter Fitzwilliam said the parcel business would focus on targeting small and medium-sized companies, rather than larger companies, which he said was a better use of its resources. ‘Its more efficient to have a wider spread of customers rather than a (smaller number) of bigger ones,’ he said. ‘We need to re-balance the sales mix and target SMEs. This will create operational improvements.’ Fitzwilliam was speaking after Business Post issued its second full-year profit warning in three months, saying an expected improvement in profit margins at its Parcel Services business had not materialised. It said pretax profits for the current year to March 31 would be only 9 mln stg.
Read MoreThe Slovak Post Office, Slovenska posta (SP), will begin offering a package of electronic services to its clients in July this year, company officials said.
The initial package of e-services should include the electronic administration of packages, payment of checks through the Internet, and hybrid mail, which means that people can write letters or postcards on their computers and SP will print them and forward to the addressees. Among other services, clients will also be able to reserve a PO Box through the Internet, the Hospodarske noviny daily reported.
Under an agreement Eesti Post (Estonian Post) and the Danish-Norwegian company Pan Nordic Logistics signed today, Eesti Post’s ELS express delivery service will expand to the Nordic countries, making the forwarding of parcels both faster and cheaper. The service meant primarily for corporate customers allows to cut the price of forwarding parcels to the Nordic countries by 20-30 percent and should shorten the time of delivery to 1-3 days depending on the area of the destination country, Eesti Post said. “We are implementing one of our strategic goals, that of expanding our ELS express delivery service to the Nordic market,” CEO Peeter Raudsepp said. The company expects the volume of ELS services to grow more than 30 percent this year.
Read MoreNightfreight says that its QuorumValue product, launched in July last year, has done more than pounds 1m-worth of business from 858 customers in less than six months. The service is aimed at a mix of consignment types that might otherwise be split among customers. A typical mix might include satchels, standard parcels and packages, IDW (irregular dimension and weight) consignments and pallets. “We have set an industry standard and have a real winner on our hands,” says IDW Network sales director Chris Meadowcroft.
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