Liberalisation, privatisation and regulation of postal services in Europe – First international experiences in the run-up to new European regulations
Read MoreDHL is responding to customer wishes in Germany by testing new parcel services and plans to simplify its portfolio by re-branding products from next January, a senior manager said.
One innovative new service was parcel deliveries in the evening, Uwe Brinks, managing director DHL Parcel Germany, told last week’s KEP Kongress in Bergisch Gladbach, near Cologne. The parcels company, with revenue of EUR 2.6 billion in 2007, is the German parcel market leader.
Research among 1,500 existing and potential B2B and B2C customers had shown that top priorities included high reliability, low damage, understandable products and good customer service based on “convenience”, Brinks said.
At the same time, competition was intensifying as more parcels operators broadened their portfolios towards a “universal” range of B2B, B2C and C2X products, he pointed out. All parcel operators were also affected by rising costs, he added.
In response to the changing environment, DHL Parcel Germany had adopted the slogan of “ Simple, Always, Everywhere”. In January 2009, it would simplify its complex product branding to “ DHL Paket” for deliveries within Germany, with various add-on options, and to “DHL Europaket/Weltpaket” for international parcels, Brinks said.
Availability was being enhanced with services such as 24/7 self-service parcel drop-off and collection points (Packstations, Paketbox), and parcel tracking by mobile phone.
The KEP Kongress, the 14th annual conference event for the postal, parcels and express sector, was organized by Hamburg-based Deutscher Verkehrs-Verlag.
Read MoreEffective retroactively from January 1, 2008, Wincor Nixdorf AG has assumed a majority stake and the operative management of prosystems IT GmbH. prosystems, which is headquartered in Bonn, specializes in the provision of IT services in the Sparkassen environment. This new stake is part of Wincor Nixdorf’s targeted expansion of its activities in the area of IT operations management for retail banking. “We’ve seen that the trend toward outsourcing and automation in retail banking continues. So we’re strengthening our outsourcing portfolio with prosystems IT. We already have customers in this area, but we want to attract additional banks with our portfolio so that we can continue to grow,” explains Eckard Heidloff, President and CEO of Wincor Nixdorf AG. For Wincor Nixdorf, this is the second joint venture specializing in the operational management of information technology for branch-related processes.
prosystems IT was created in 2004 when the IT operations of two savings banks, Stadtsparkasse Köln and Kreissparkasse Köln, were merged with the subsidiary of the now amalgamated Sparkasse Bonn and Kreissparkasse Siegburg, PROSERVICE GmbH, and with the SDZ Sparkassen-Dienstezentrum, a savings bank service center. The participating Sparkassen have outsourced large parts of the operational management of their IT to prosystems IT.
prosystems has 223 employees and had sales last fiscal year of approximately 43 million euros.
In the future, Wincor Nixdorf will hold 51% of the interests in prosystems. The remaining interests will be held by Kreissparkasse Köln (20.17%), by Sparkasse KölnBonn (26.38%) and by SDZ Sparkassen-Dienstezentrum (2.45%), which itself is the subsidiary of the savings banks Verbandssparkasse Goch, Sparkasse Wiehl, Stadtsparkasse Wermelskirchen, Stadtsparkasse Bad Honnef and Kreissparkasse Düsseldorf.
Read MoreDeutsche Postbank AG is reporting positive results and further growth in its operating business in the first three months of 2008.
The Bonn-based bank increased sales of checking account and savings products and generated a record high number of new private loans in the first quarter, as well as improving its core operating figures – net interest income and net fee and commission income – as against the same period of the previous year. By contrast, net trading income and net income from investment securities declined due to the effects of the capital market crisis.
In the first three months of 2008, profit before tax fell by 25.2 pct year-on-year to EUR 166 million as a result of the turbulent market environment. Accordingly, the return on equity before taxes also declined from 17.0 pct at March 31, 2007 to 13.2 pct at March 31, 2008. The cost-income ratio improved from 69.4 pct to 73.9 pct in the same period, while the figure for Postbank”s traditional banking business (excluding Transaction Banking) rose from 67.3 pct to 71.8 pct.
In the first three months, Postbank increased the number of free checking accounts sold by 133,000 or 13.7 pct. At the end of the quarter, the Bank managed a total of 4.9 million private checking accounts for its customers. The strategic focus on value-oriented volume growth in Postbank’s savings business, which was announced in late 2007, also started to bear fruit: the volume of traditional savings deposits increased by around EUR 0.5 billion as against year-end 2007 to total EUR 44.4 billion.
The home savings volume also developed positively despite the downturn in the market as a whole, with a new contract volume of EUR 2.81 billion in the first three months of 2008 – up 2.4 pct on the same period of the previous year.
Postbank recorded the highest volume of new private loans since the launch of its Privatkredit product, with a year-on-year increase of almost 73 pct to EUR 380 million. At EUR 2.46 billion, the total private lending volume at March 31, 2008 was 7.4 pct higher than at the end of 2007.
Cologne/Bonn airport expects to post a loss of EUR 6.9 million for the current year. The chairman of the board, Michael Garvens recently said in Cologne that the shortfall was due to the withdrawal of DHL and Lufthansa Cargo. He expects that the airport will only handle around 570,000 t of freight this year, which equates to 21 pct less than in 2007. After five successful years, 2008 will be one with challenged, Garvens stated. The airport hopes the situation will improve in the long term by its new customer FedEx, which wants to massively expand its activities from 2010. The airport boosted its turnover to EUR 271.1 million in 2007, a 5.8 pct increase compared to 2006. Earnings before tax rose by 10 pct to EUR 5.5 million.
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