The agreement for the operation of the brokerage-insurance company Post Insurance Brokerage S.A. was signed by the Chairman of TT Hellenic Postbank, Mr. Angelos Filippidis and the Managing Director of ELTA, Mr. Stamatis Mavros.
Read MoreThe new Postal Operations Council (POC) formally adopted a structure focused on product lines and designated the countries that will chair the various groups within four broad committees.
The POC is meeting for the first time since Congress.
Four committees will oversee the work of the Union in the areas of letter-post, parcels, postal financial services and standards and technology. Groups within these committees will further deal with specific operational issues affecting members of the postal sector, such as quality of service, customs, security, standards, addressing and electronic services, to name but a few.
POC Chairman, Andreas Taprantzis, who is also the Greek Post’s CEO, said a simplified structure will “streamline the decision-making process. Groups and Committees are taking up a lot of the burden. The plenary should be free from trivial decision-making and focus the debate on strategic issues. We need a fresh perspective… and make [it] attractive to the management of postal operators.”
Some 700 delegates from around the world are at UPU headquarters in Berne to attend the POC, whose work plan over the next four years is ambitious.
Read MoreCountry sheet: Greece – Main developments in the postal sector (2006-2008)
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.
International postal services are moving resolutely towards the future, declared Edouard Dayan, Director General of the Universal Postal Union, at the close of the 24th Universal Postal Congress, which ended its three weeks of discussions today.
“From Bucharest to Geneva, the whole tone has changed. Four years ago, an air of pessimism hung around the future of postal services” said Dayan. “Today, our agenda includes e-commerce, technological development, intelligent mail, facilitation of international trade and exchanges, electronic money transfers, sustainable development, international cooperation, postal infrastructure at the service of development policies, and development – rather than downsizing – of the universal service”. At the closing session of Congress, the Director General also described the many faces of a sector which is active on all fronts of the global economy, in the face of burgeoning new technologies and the growth of globalization and international trade.
Aside from the elections, Congress also examined 300 proposals and resolutions relating to the structure of the UPU, its mission and finances, and to international exchanges of letters, parcels and money transfers between postal operators the world over. In terms of operations, for example, minimum security standards and processes for postal operators will be drawn up, and Posts are invited to work more closely with customs authorities to identify counterfeit or pirated articles sent through the mail.
Read More
Post & Parcel Magazine is our print publication, released 3 times a year. Packed with original content and thought-provoking features, Post & Parcel Magazine is a must-read for those who want the inside track on the industry.
