The European Commission said on Wednesday it had concerns about changes proposed by Slovakia for the country’s postal system and it intends to take measures to make sure EU competition rules are followed.
‘Unfortunately, the amendments did not address Commission concerns about hybrid mail,’ a spokesman for the European Union executive told reporters.
Read MoreThere’s a new whiff of privatisation in the air. Two of mainland Europe’s biggest state-owned utilities, La Poste in France and Deutsche Bahn in Germany, have signalled they are planning for an injection of private capital as they gear up for liberalisation of EU markets in the post and on the railways.
The postal market is due to be fully competitive from 2011 while the rail market will pre-date it by two years. But the two behemoths are already planning their transformation, with DB’s Hartmut Mehdorn, its chief executive, saying its float of 24.9 pct of its transport, logistics and services arm will take place in late October. This could raise EUR 5bn in one of Europe’s biggest most recent IPOs.
The more extraordinary of the two operations is that of La Poste. Throughout the tortuous negotiations among EU institutions over postal liberalisation, originally slated for 2009, the French operator was among the fiercest critics of full-scale competition – unlike the British, Germans and Swedes. But Jean-Paul Bailly, its chairman, has had a Damascene conversion.
He now wants to raise up to EUR 3bn to help finance La Poste’s European expansion and to get the legal process in place so that the public enterprise, changed into a SA (PLC), can open up its capital as early as 2011. Rather than attract pension funds, Bailly apparently wants to raise capital via the stockmarket. The state, probably in the form of its investment arm, the CDC, could play a restricted role and the 400,000 current and retired employees would be reserved their share. But the target is institutional and retail investors.
The British group, in its submission to the independent (Hooper) review of the postal market, complains repeatedly of its limited equity capital as its struggles to deal with losses in its declining universal, six-day letters service and what it claims is a GBP 2.6bn cash gap caused by price controls. Its regulator, Postcomm, openly favours the injection of private capital and private sector partnerships to enable a “more rapid transformation” and make it more efficient and profitable.
But it’s far from clear how this would be achieved and experts believe that private capital will only be available if Royal Mail is broken up, with profitable parts of its business like Parcelforce sold off. Meanwhile, the Greeks and Estonians are thinking of privatising their postal operator. The Danes and Swedes are getting together, with the Danish state, postal employees and private equity group CVC owning 40% and the Swedish state and employees of Posten owning the other 60% of the combined operation.
Unless the Hooper report comes up with some radical proposals and this or the next government is ready to bite the bullet, the Brits, the privatisation pioneers, are in danger of being left behind in the EU – again.
Deutsche Bank said on Wednesday (10 September) it was in advanced talks to take a stake in rival Deutsche Postbank.
Deutsche Bank Chief Executive Josef Ackerman signaled earlier on in the day that he would buy into Postbank if the price was right.
Ackermann labeled Postbank — with almost 15 million customers and a market value of more than USD 10 billion — a good fit for Germany’s biggest lender.
Sources with direct knowledge of the matter later told Reuters a deal had already been broadly agreed.
Postbank has called a meeting of its supervisory board for Friday to decide on selling part of its 50 percent plus one share holding, the sources said.
If Deutsche Bank keeps its stake below 30 percent, it would not have to bid for the rest of Postbank’s shares but would be in pole position to win control of the group later.
The Bonner-Generalanzeiger newspaper reported that Deutsche Bank plans to buy just under 30 percent of Postbank with a right of first refusal to buy the remaining Post-owned shares.
Read MoreThe market for Russian postal services is growing rapidly and was valued at about $1 billion in 2003, with Pochta Rossii accounting for 80 percent of that number. Today, delivering letters makes up only 20 percent of the post office’s income.
Technically speaking, the Russian postal market was opened to competition in 1996 when the Ministry of Communications removed the state monopoly on postal services.
The Russian government is now a major source of business for Russian Post. Certain large streams of mail from other government agencies, like the delivery of 60 million pension checks annually, are routed through Russian Post.
Most of its revenue, however, comes from delivering goods. There are some local delivery services in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Competition with international carriers for lucrative and strategically important package delivery and logistics services is concentrated in the western hub regions of Russia. This is a booming market, and DHL Worldwide, TNT, FedEx, UPS and others are all involved.
In 2004, Russian Post launched its own national express mail operator (EMS — Russian Post) with prices that are 20% lower than competitors on average. EMS relies on its connections with the regular postal network and touts deliveries made “door-to-door.” More than 42,000 post offices throughout Russia make EMS deliveries, and 5,500 post offices in Russia accept EMS items.
It is unclear whether Russian Post subsidizes EMS with proceeds from traditional mail. Even though the Russian government eliminated the state postal monopoly in 1996, PR still controls 80 percent of the postal market and so has sufficient market dominance to build EMS on the backs of ordinary stamp-buying consumers.
EMS claims annual revenues in the area of $300 million and an annual growth rate of 30-40 percent.
Firms like Western Union compete in the money transfer business against PR’s Cybermoney system. PR rates are set to undercut the competition by as much as 35 percent.
Privatization
In 2002, Minister of Communications and Information Technology Leonid Reiman told Prime-TASS in an interview that “There are no plans for privatizing Russia’s postal service in the near future,” although he added that there remained a possibility that it might be reformed into a 100-percent government-owned company.
Current law does not allow for the privatization of postal service companies. In 2006 Reiman told a Cabinet session that of the many countries that tried to privatize their postal services, few succeeded. “For example, the U.S. Postal Service is a government corporation and is subsidized from the budget to perform socially important functions.”
Read MoreThe Hungarian Postal Service (Magyar Posta) will refresh its database containing information about the lifestyles of clients, and consequently they are currently sending out millions of questionnaires to Hungarian households, reports Napi.hu (subscriber only).
The questionnaires will be addressed to those clients who are currently included in the database, in addition to being sent to another two million residents. The questions can also be answered online.
The update was made necessary because the rights to manage the current database will expire at the end of this year, so Magyar Posta is required by law to delete it. Results from the current study can be used from next year onward. Based on the collected information, the company can approach clients with customized offers which fit into their lifestyle.
As they have previously, the company is encouraging clients to fill in and return the questionnaires with prizes worth a total of Ft 10 million (over €41,000), with the main prize being a Fiat.
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