Tag: Poste Italiane

Italy's antitrust accepts post office commitments to end liberalisation probe

Posted by | Feb 28, 2008 | |

Italy’s antitrust authority said it has decided to accept commitments made by Poste Italiane SpA to settle an investigation into the post office’s market position in liberalised services.

Last August, the authority launched the probe after a series of complaints from private postal operators and from TNT Post Italia SpA.

Today, the authority said the post office commitments should remove the anti-competitive issues raised by the state company’s conduct.

The commitments proposed by the post office have been strengthened as a result of ‘market testing’ with rivals, it said.

The commitments include a tender for concessions to collect and deliver post in 70 different urban areas with an overall value of 168 mln eur over three years, it said.

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Opening of EU mail markets to raise competitive pressure on postal companies -S&P

Posted by | Feb 28, 2008 | |

Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services said the opening of the EU’s 90 bln eur mail markets to full competition from 2011 will raise the competitive pressure on the four large European postal companies, Deutsche Post AG, rated ‘A-‘ with a negative outlook, TNT NV, rated ‘BBB+’, La Poste, rated ‘AA-‘ and Italy’s Poste Italiane Group, rated ‘A’, with stable outlooks.
S&P said the slow pace of liberalisation over a 15-year period has also offered a strong competitive advantage to these incumbent national mail services. This has given the companies the chance to reposition themselves in more lucrative segments of the mail market and expand into non-mail activities like international express and logistics and financial services.
Deutsche Post and TNT are likely to be key players in sector consolidation, and their ratings will continue to benefit from their strongly cash-generative mail segments, the agency added.
S&P said state-owned La Poste will also benefit from the slow pace of full liberalisation of its home market, which gives it more time to streamline and modernize its mail operations, leverage its costly network with its enlarged banking offer, and eventually match competitors’ efficiency and profitability.
While, Poste Italiane, although also not privatised, may be in a stronger position because its financial services contribute a strong 67 pct of its total sales, compared with 22 pct for La Poste, the agency said.
All four players may also face regulation risks because the European Commission liberalisation plan still upholds the controversial ‘universal service obligation on incumbent national postal services, obliging them to continue to provide full territorial collection and delivery at least five days a week at an affordable cost, S&P added.

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Latest ‘Future of Mail’ paper: “Mail Trends Update” by Fouad Nader (Adrenale Corp.) and Michael Lintell (Pitney Bowes)

Posted by | Feb 1, 2008 | |

In recent years there has been an increase in the number of press articles and statements from posts predicting that mail volumes would decline. New technologies and process innovations have been introduced, preoccupying researchers and managers in the postal and mailing industries with the impact of accelerating electronic substitution and changing customer behaviors. What are the actual trends that emerge from examining in detail the best information available from key countries? What historical perspectives, trends and emerging patterns may be useful in understanding how mail volumes may evolve in the future? The purpose of this paper is to provide further insight into the key trends identified and discussed in the previous Mail Trends Analyses by comprehensively examining the evolution of mail and analyzing postal volumes along key variables that influence mail demand. This paper builds on the considerable research that followed the original mail trends analysis and was documented in the Background Papers published at www.postinsight.pb.com for the project: “Electronic Substitution for Mail: Models and Results, Myth and Reality.” The paper also takes advantage of recent work in the study of the “Future of Mail”, also on postinsight.pb.com.

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Italy’s “safe” postal bank ready to float

Posted by | Jan 11, 2008 | |

Now might not be a great time to launch a financial services stock, but Italy’s national postal service — led by its booming banking unit — is gearing up for a float.

When that happens depends on the government, but the company — emboldened by a foray into financial services that turned it around from a loss-making bureaucracy — is already rivalling more obviously sophisticated institutions for capital.

“At the moment, we are working as if at any moment we would be asked to become public,” Chief Executive Massimo Sarmi told Reuters in an interview.

Having rewritten its history as a lethargic administration that could barely be trusted to deliver a letter in time, the post office was valued this year by investment banks at as much as 15 billion euros, said Sarmi. He declined to say which banks had provided the estimate.

That would make it Italy’s third-largest retail bank by market value at current share prices and is 50 percent higher than the estimated value Sarmi cited for the postal group more than a year ago.

And while billions have been wiped off banks’ market value globally by their loans to ‘subprime’ borrowers, analysts say the post office — which in a float would offer shares to both domestic and foreign investors — is a banking story that has succeeded by betting on the simple and safe.

Key to Poste Italiane’s business model has been a strategy of using its 14,000 outlets across Italy to offer bank accounts and loans, exploiting its reputation as a conservative player that has catered to pensioners and families for decades

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