French state postal operator La Poste is poised to announce increases to its letter and parcel prices.
Contacted by CEP-Research, a company spokesperson did not elaborate on the scale of the parcel tariff hikes in the pipeline.
The most recent changes date back to 1 January 2017 when packages of more than 2 kilos increased by 1%. Tariffs for parcels with a unit weight of under 2 kilos – 80% of shipments – did not increase, she noted.
The spokesperson confirmed information in a French media report which said that La Poste would be raising letter rates to a greater extent than it had initially planned as a result of a recent decision by France's postal and telecommunications watchdog, ARCEP, to change the rules governing “regulatory accounting.”
Following Arcep's decision, La Poste had been working on defining rate increases by type of product – business and first and second-class mail – which the new framework provided scope for.
“Submitted to ARCEP for approval, the price changes will be announced before the end of the month,” the spokesperson explained.
The media report said that under the prior pricing framework, covering the period 2015-2018, ARCEP had authorised La Poste to increase rates by an average of 3.5% above inflation on an annual basis.
This was designed to cushion the impact of the steady decline in letter volumes and to help La Poste to re-develop its business model.
La Poste used up 50% of the increases allowed over the terms of the agreement in 2015 alone with prices rising by an average of 7% and by 15% for a first-class letter. After further increases in 2016 and 2017, the maximum hike in 2018 open to the operator was 1.5%.
This led to ARCEP “re-evaluating the obligations weighing on La Poste within the framework of its universal service missions” and “raising the tariff ceiling for 2018 to a maximum of 5%,” the report added.
Separately, La Poste last week announced the start of a 12-month ‘cybersecurity’ trial with French multinational company, Thales, whose activities include services to the aerospace, defence, transportation and security industries. This is aimed at improving implementation of the measures enacted in France's Military Programming Law (LPM) to heighten the security of the information systems deployed by critical infrastructure providers.
Another key aspect of the partnership is that La Poste will offer services of security incident detection providers and security incident response providers who will interact through Thales's Cyber Threat Intelligence platform.
“Through this partnership, which is the first of its kind, Le Groupe La Poste and Thales have agreed to conduct real-life tests aimed at enhancing cybersecurity products and services in order to guarantee the high levels of cyberattack detection and response performance required by the LPM,” Thales said in a statement.
