MAIL

Business Units and Market Positions

The Postal Service for Germany

We are Europe’s largest postal company, delivering some 70 million letters every working day in Germany. We offer all types of products and services to both private and business customers, ranging from standard letters and merchandise to special services such as cash on delivery and registered mail. Customers can now also purchase stamps online or via text messaging rather than just at our retail outlets or from stamp machines as in the past. In addition, we develop tailor-made mailing solutions to meet the needs of business customers and organisations. For example, we digitalised all of the applications for the Umweltprämie (environmental rebate), which the German government introduced in 2009 to promote passenger car sales, and transmitted them in electronic form to the German federal office of economics and export control.

Our mail business focuses on Germany, where the mail market was fully liberalised at the start of 2008. Since then, competition has become more intense. In addition, the domestic mail market is shrinking because electronic communication is increasingly replacing paper-based communication. The economic crisis acted to intensify this trend. In the year under review, the market decreased by 3.1% to around €6.3 billion (previous year: €6.5 billion). We held our share of the market at 87.2% thanks to our high quality.