Service-oriented - Die Schweizerische Post

10 Annual Geschäftsbericht Report | Interview 2006
In the current situation we are allowed
to sell mortgages only in cooperation
with UBS and have to share the margins
with it. Naturally this limits our room to
manoeuvre. We are prepared to enter
the retail market under the same conditions
as our competitors. For this we
need the appropriate legal basis. ( 7)
Swiss Post is calling for employment
contracts to be subject to the Swiss
Code of Obligations and is also outsourcing
more and more of its service
from the parent company to public
companies. Does this mean the end of
the social partnership?
This brings us to the topic of equal conditions
for all market players. We are
in favour of collective employment contracts
for certain sectors (industry CECs)
on the basis of the Swiss Code of Obligations
( 10), as we believe that competition
should be based not on salaries
but on the quality of services. Swiss Post
operates in several sectors open to competition.
To ensure that everyone has the
same opportunities we must bring about
these CECs in the medium term. Of
course we stand behind the principle of
social partnership.
Swiss Post is a traditional Swiss institution
that is now expanding abroad
on the profit it generates with its monopoly
business. Why?
First of all: Of the sum which you call the
profit from the monopoly business,
which is 837 million francs, we generate
the lion’s share in direct competition.
Less than one third is generated by
monopoly business, and this is used to
finance the basic service.
And now to your question: in Switzerland
we are facing declining mail volumes.
One major reason for this is
substitution of letters and other postal
items with electronic forms of communication.
In order to counter these lost
earnings we are looking beyond Switzerland’s
borders and want to grow abroad
in post-related niche markets. ( 6)
Essentially, our subsidiaries operate in
three areas abroad. Swiss Post International
(SPI) focuses on cross-border traffic
in the business customer segment.
SPI’s business is geared primarily to safeguarding
the domestic market. The rapidly
growing MailSource Group offers
successful in-house postal services for
companies. MailSource also generates
business for the other units of Swiss
Post. The third unit is GHP Group, in
which we acquired a two-thirds stake in
2006. It operates in the growing market
for customer loyalty programmes and
dialogue marketing. With GHP we aim
to globalize our business even further
and develop activities that will ultimately
generate postal items. New strategic
options are opening up for Swiss Post
International and MailSource in terms of
delivery to end customers and in the
field of document management. Sophisticated
GHP services such as integrated,
card-based customer loyalty programmes
can be adapted to Swiss needs. GHP is
the market leader in Germany for health
insurance cards. This will create synergies
for the future Swiss health card.
These three units employ almost 3,400
people and contribute around 17.6 percent
to Group sales, and the trend is on
the increase.
Let’s stay in the international arena:
what is Swiss Post’s stance, as a company
owned by the Confederation,
on the obligations entered into by
Switzerland under the Kyoto Protocol
on climate protection?
At Swiss Post we have adopted the obligations
and targets of the Kyoto Protocol.
In this way we also acknowledge
that climate change will mean a need for
us as a company to take specific action.
We are, for instance, also optimizing our
transport system to bring it into line with
ecological requirements. Although, for
economic reasons, we currently handle a
slightly higher portion of our goods
transport by road, the overall result in
terms of energy and the climate is better