Start-up German parcels operator Red Parcel Post is delaying its market entry from end-2006 tomid-2007 but has denied market speculation about its financing. The privately-owned company plans
to invest more than €300 million in completely new infrastructure, including RFID-basedoperations.“These rumours have no foundation,” founder Dieter Seegers-Krückeberg, a former Deutsche PostGermany parcels chief, told German newspaper Die Welt in an interview. “We will start constructionof our sorting facility in Magdeburg this month,” he declared. But he confirmed that an operationalstart is now scheduled for mid-2007 rather than the original plan for an end-2006 start.
Seegers-Krückeberg said that he had secured a “renowned entrepreneur” from outside the transportindustry as a shareholder in the company. In the past, logistics companies such as Fiege, Rhenus,Hellmann, DSV and Kühne & Nagel have been named as potential investors but no deals wereagreed.
Red Parcel Post has now bought four pieces of land for its parcel sorting centres, thecompany founder said. Alongside the hub in Magdeburg (eastern Germany), it plans facilities nearHannover, Unna (north-west Germany) and Würzburg (southern Germany). The company has also signeddeals with VW for delivery trucks and vans, with SAP for an IT system and with van der Lande forsorting system, Die Welt reported.
Seegers-Krückeberg, who in the 1990s was a driving force behind Deutsche Post’s €2 billioninvestment in a nationwide network of 33 regional parcel sorting centres, stressed: “For ourfreight concept we only need 15% of the investment that Deutsche Post invested in the past toachieve the same capacity.” Red Parcel Post aims to operate more cost-efficiently by reducing thenumber of sorting processes and using RFID chips within the logistics chain.
Last October the company said that it was aiming to gain a double-digit market share byundercutting the prices of other companies, and was targeting turnover of €850 million by 2012.
