POSTA ELETTRONICA IBRIDA
PRESS RELEASE
PRESS RELEASE
ANTITRUST: ITALIAN POST OFFICE FINED €1.6 MILLION FOR ABUSE OF DOMINANT POSITION IN HYBRID ELECTRONIC MAIL
New decree and the Authority’s measures open up market
Company’s six-month price freeze viewed positively
The Italian Competition Authority, at its meeting on 29 March 2006, decided that the Italian Post Office had abused its dominant position in the market for delivery of hybrid e-mail by giving preference to its subsidiary Postel and effectively closing down the market which had been opened up to competitors who print and put mail into envelopes for large companies.
The Authority imposed a fine of €1.6 million on Poste Italiane, judging positively the company’s undertaking to freeze prices for delivery of hybrid mail for six months from the time the new ministerial decree governing access to delivery services came into force.
Based on the Authority’s decision, Poste Italiane has 45 days to define new general conditions of access to the postal network, in conformity with competitive principles, modifying the previously stipulated conditions and ensuring that present and future competitors have equal access with Postel or other subsidiaries. Amongst these conditions, the Authority clarified that the Italian Post Office must allow such operators to deliver hybrid mail to the postal network’s receiving centres, thus eliminating the obligation to have the Post Office take delivery at their printing works.
The investigation, which began on 23 February 2005, documented a number of instances of anti-competitive conduct on the part of Poste Italiane, directly or by way of its subsidiary Postel, which were intended to exclude potential new competitors or limit the activities of existing operators in the liberalized market for hybrid e-mail.
Specifically, Poste Italiane:
- applied unjustified and discriminatory conditions on access to the delivery network, beyond even those foreseen in the Ministerial Decree of 18 February 1999, which was itself seen as contrasting with the competition rules under Articles 10, 82 and 86 of the European Treaty;
- maintained for an important part of the market, and in particular for a number of important customers, a delivery charge which was lower than the hybrid e-mail charge, conduct which discriminated against competitors;
- gave huge advantages - economic, informational and financial - to its Postel subsidiary;
- adopted a plan of alliances (federalist plan) with present and potential competitors containing expressly exclusive clauses to tie them to itself and preclude their direct entry into the hybrid e-mail market.
In the Authority’s view, this conduct constitutes a serious, single yet multi-faceted violation of Article 82 of the European Treaty which lasted basically from 1999 until 2005.
In arriving at a fine of €1.6 million, the Authority, which had begun on the basis of €3.2 million, took into consideration the Post Office’s conduct in eliminating or mitigating the consequences of its violation: including the undertaking to freeze current rates for the delivery of hybrid e-mail and the suspension of the federalist plan which foresaw co-opting operators who were already supplying services to the Group into ongoing local sub-contracting partnerships.
A further extenuating circumstance was the ministerial regulation of 1999 which may have led the Post Office into behaviour incompatible with Article 82.
It is noted with satisfaction that, following the investigation, the ministerial regulation of 1999 has been replaced by a new decree, of 17 February 2006, which eliminates the quantitative thresholds previously stipulated for access to the postal network by new operators in the area of hybrid e-mail: the limit has been reduced from a minimum of 50 million items handled to just one million. This regulation, along with the elimination of the requirement that the Post Office take delivery of messages from printing works, thus enabling delivery to the postal network’s receiving centres, seems to be sufficient to ensure the opening up of the market for hybrid e-mail and its competitive development.
Rome, 10/04/2006