ITALIAN POSTAL SERVICE/SDA GROUP (Decision not to commence investigation)
PRESS RELEASE
Express Mail: Poste Italiane can buy SDA
After having received reassurances from Poste Italiane S.p.A. the Italian Antitrust Authority has authorised them to buy out the entire SDA Group.
This operation of concentration is concerned with the carrying of express mail: a liberalized postal service which offers some supplementary service, such as guaranteed delivery, pick up from sender's address, the possibility of changing the destination of the addressee while the item is travelling.
Recently the market for transporting express mail has gone through a concentration which has involved both small players specialized in a sector or locale as well as large multinationals. At the international level, in particular, the TNT Group has been purchased by the Netherlands Postal Service, Jet Worldwide Express has been bought by the French Postal Service and finally Deutsche Post has acquired a stake in DHL International, currently controlled by Deutsche Post, Lufthansa and JAL.
Though the position of Poste Italiane in the express mail market is marginal, the supply of a new liberalized service by the public postal system operator through a concentration takes on particular importance from the point of view of competition, in consideration of the special and exclusive rights it still maintains in the supplying of normal postal services and in its dominant position in the dispensing of other liberalized postal services.
Faced with this situation, Poste Italiane has, for the Authority, assumed a series of obligations to integrate, extend and partially modify the preventive communication of the concentration. In particular Poste Italiane has promised to:
1) maintain the structures of Poste Italiane and the SDA Group separate, with separate management of their accounting, both for costs and revenue;
2) not use the profits coming from services offered in a monopolistic area to finance the operating costs of the acquired companies;
3) guarantee that the commercial relationships between Poste Italiane and the SDA Group are regulated exclusively by market conditions;
4) apply immediately the separation of accounting between the services reserved to them and those which are liberalized, according to the communitary regulations;
5) not use in the near future the structures of Poste Italiane to support the activities and organization of the SDA Group, or rather to notify the Authority in advance of any plan in which the SDA Group would use the infrastructure of Poste Italiane, following principles of transparency and separation of accounting for the dispensed services clearly reflecting the two roles, one in monopolistic regime and the other in competition so as not to discriminate against companies.
Based on these considerations and the obligations assumed by Poste Italiane, the Authority has decided not to open an investigation based on Art 16 of Law No. 287/90.