MAIL Division

Deutsche Post DHL is Europe's largest postal company. We deliver more than 64 million letters every working day in Germany alone. We offer all types of products and services to both private and business customers, ranging from physical, hybrid and electronic letters and merchandise to special services such as cash on delivery and registered mail. Availability for our customers is always our number one priority: today, our customers can purchase stamps at retail outlets, points of sale, stamp dispensers, online and via text message.

Our E-Postbrief product provides a secure, confidential and reliable platform for electronic communication. It can be used for everything from personalised customer communication to bulk mailing. E-Postbrief allows companies, public authorities and private individuals not only to meet high security standards but also to reduce processing costs.

Our mail business is focused on Germany, where the mail market has been fully liberalised since the beginning of 2008. Since July 2010, we have been required to apply value added tax to revenues generated from business customers. Competition has intensified considerably as a result, whilst at the same time the increasing use of electronic communication is resulting in a continuing shrinkage of the German mail market. In the year under review, the market for business communications was approximately EUR 4.2 billion (previous year: EUR 4.3 billion).

In order to more precisely reflect actual market conditions, we report on the competitive business customer market. We therefore indicate those companies that are service providers to business customers, i. e., both competitors who offer end-to-end solutions as well as consolidators who offer partial services. Our market share declined slightly from 63.7% to 62.7%.

Companies can use our solutions to design and print advertising mail themselves and send it at reasonable rates via our company. Dialogue marketing is only effective if addresses are updated constantly without breaching data protection regulations. We provide our customers with online tools and services to ensure the quality of their addresses and for the efficient identification of target groups. Companies may rent the addresses of these identified target groups from us for their own advertising campaigns as needed. We also offer customers a broad range of digital dialogue marketing solutions to use for cross-media and targeted advertising.

The German dialogue marketing market comprises advertising mail along with telephone and e-mail marketing. In the reporting year, this market shrank by 4.3% year-on-year to a volume of EUR 17.7 billion (previous year: EUR 18.5 billion). Some companies considerably reduced advertising expenditure, especially in the mail-order business - which included, for instance, the insolvency of Neckermann. We were able to maintain our share of this highly fragmented market at 13.5%, despite the difficult environment.

We deliver newspapers and magazines throughout Germany and on the day specified by the customer. Our Press Services business unit offers customers two main products in this context: preferred periodicals, which is the traditional method publishers use to post the publications to which their customers have subscribed, and standard periodicals, which companies primarily use to distribute customer or employee magazines via Deutsche Post DHL. We also partner with publishers to sell subscriptions to more than 500 press products both online and offline as part of our Deutsche Post Leserservice, a service that has seen much success. Our special services include electronic address updating as well as complaint and quality management. In addition, we offer publishers and journalists an online marketplace for journalistic content: DieRedaktion.de.

According to company estimates, the German press services market had a total volume of 15.1 billion items in 2012, a decline of 5.0% on the prior year. Some newspapers and magazines have been discontinued, or circulation figures or weights have decreased. Our competitors are mainly companies that deliver regional daily newspapers. In an overall shrinking market, we continued to maintain our share at 11.4%.

Our customers entrust us with components of their mail communications value chain. For instance, we operate their mailrooms and provide them with printing, enveloping and scanning services.

Our network comprises over 20,000 retail outlets and points of sale, around 2,500 Packstations and around 1,000 Paketboxes. On the whole we transport more than three million parcels and small packages within Germany every working day.

Private customers can go online to purchase shipping boxes from us, buy postage for parcels, place collection orders, track items and choose how they would like to receive them via the paket.de portal. For business customers we transport catalogues, goods and returns. We support both online buyers and sellers, a business that continues to boom, from the moment the order is placed and the purchase is made to shipping the product and hedging against non-payment. At our shopping portal, MeinPaket.de, we offer small and medium-sized retailers in particular an online platform to sell their products. We also offer our customers in Germany transport services for heavy shipments, such as furniture or large appliances.

As a strategic investor in All you need GmbH, we continue to develop the logistics infrastructure for delivering food in Germany.

The German parcel market volume totalled around EUR 7.8 billion in 2012, nearly 6.3% more than the prior year. For years now, e-commerce has been the most important driver of growth. In 2012, business customer volumes again experienced double-digit growth and had a positive impact on growth in the mail-order and parcel services businesses. Overall, our market share in the reporting year was approximately 40.9%.

In addition to our core service market of Germany, we also carry mail and parcels across borders and offer international dialogue marketing services. In addition, we serve business customers in key domestic mail markets, including the United States and China. We meanwhile also offer return services to online retailers in 21 European countries.

We set ourselves apart from the competition by offering innovative products that respond to customer and market needs. Our portfolio includes international physical, hybrid and electronic written communications, giving customers the flexibility to decide what best suits their needs. Foreign customers tap into our expertise and experience in order to do business successfully in the German market. We are developing international parcel solutions for the growing e-commerce sector.

The global market volume for outbound international mail was approximately EUR6.8 billion in 2012 (previous year: EUR6.9 billion). The decline in simple letters and press products could only be compensated for in part by the increase in heavy items. Despite the difficult environment, we were able to slightly increase our market share from 15.7% to 15.8%.