Austrian Post has gained regulatory approval to take over the bulk of DHL Parcel’s operations in Austria, increasing its market leadership as Deutsche Post DHL exits the country’s domestic B2C market.
The Austrian competition and anti-trust authorities yesterday gave the green light for the transaction under certain conditions.
From August 1, Austrian Post will take over three logistics centres and 10 delivery depots as well as most of DHL Parcel Austria’s 220-strong workforce. However, it will have to offer competitors the use of this infrastructure for a fee, the competition authorities decided.
Under the deal announced by the two companies in March this year, Deutsche Post DHL is quitting the Austrian domestic B2C parcels market and will partner instead with Austrian Post for cross-border parcel deliveries to Austria. A downsized DHL Parcel Austria will in future only handle export parcels from Austria.
Deutsche Post DHL Group reiterated that customers in Austria would benefit from high quality delivery services, short transit times and deliveries on six days a week.
The strategic partnership marks the end of DP DHL’s €100 million expansion into the Austrian parcels market over the past three years, comes amid wider restructuring measures at the German mail and logistics giant, and also follows Amazon’s move to start delivering its own parcels in the country.
DHL Parcel entered the Austrian market in 2015 as part of its expansion into various European markets and with Amazon as a major customer. The German group announced it would invest €100 million to build up an operational network. Two sorting centres have so far gone into operation, near Vienna and near Graz in the south of the country, and the third, at Enns close to Linz, is due to go into operation this summer.
In 2018, DHL Parcel Austria delivered some 36 million parcels, including 27 million domestic parcels (including for Amazon) and about 9 million export parcels. Austrian Post, which delivered 108 million parcels (B2C and B2B) across the country last year, will thus increase its leading 59% share of the B2C market by taking over a large part of DHL’s volumes.
According to the recently-published ‘CEP Radar’ from consultants Kreutzer Fischer & Partner, DHL Parcel had 27% of the Austrian consumer parcels market last year, well behind Austrian Post but clearly ahead of Hermes (12%) and DPD (10%). The overall Austrian CEP market grew by 9% to 228 million parcels last year, with 58% of these B2C and 42% B2B shipments, the study said.
