Parcels, frozen food, energy, passports and tlc: this is how Poste aims to become an over the top with a thousand tentacles

Poste Italiane had been looking for more than a year at the possibility of combining its business with that of Tim. And for months it had already been trying to think about the possibility of taking control of the telecommunications company. On the government side, however, there would have been coldness. Until the risk loomed on the horizon that two foreign players would buy the Italian telephone group: the telephone operator Iliad and the US fund Cvc. It is probably no coincidence that just over a year ago the first commercial agreement was signed with the group led by Pietro Labriola.

The contract entrusts Poste with the management of Tim's warehouses in the logistics business. This is one of the first agreements signed in this area by Poste, for which warehouse management represents a new business to enter in order to consolidate its position in the logistics sector. A similar contract had also been signed with the Acqua e Sapone chain.

The entry in recent months into Tim's capital, with the position of major shareholder with a stake of just under 25%, opens up new opportunities for the delivery company to make cost synergies (estimated by analysts in the order of several hundred million euros). For example, it has already been announced by Poste that the contract for the supply of cloud services, which until now was entrusted by Vodafone, is being defined. But opportunities are also opening up with the possibility of pooling with Tim the physical and digital networks for the distribution of products and services: from the supply of telephone connections (Poste Mobile brings a dowry of 4 million customers), to fibre, to energy (Poste already sells energy and gas to over 700 thousand retail customers, but the offer could be extended to Tim's customers through its network of over 4 thousand shops), to financial and insurance services. In this last area, Tim had already activated a distribution offer for non-life products on behalf of third parties on home, travel, health and skiing, relying on some companies (such as Generali). The Poste Group controls Poste Vita and through Poste Assicura sells non-life products on the network of 13,000 post office counters, as well as having acquired NetInsurance, which in turn sells insurance products through bank and broker networks. Both have entered the business of catastrophe policies for companies. With Postepay, the delivery group has a leading European position in card and digital payments; in 2022 it also took over Lis, a company that has agreements to handle payments in 51,000 tobacconist's, bars and newsagents. All this, it should be remembered, does not solve the problem of the falling profitability of mobile telephony in Italy due to excessive competition. So, sooner or later, an agreement with Iliad will have to come. And perhaps it will open up international prospects, since the French telephone group has operations in Brazil, just as the Telecom group controls Tim Brazil.

Poste's management is looking at business models such as that of the Japanese Rakuten, which since the beginning of 2000 has become one of the world's ten largest internet companies, together with Amazon, InterActive and Expedia. It has 3,700 employees, a capitalisation of EUR 5 billion and its e-commerce site is one of the largest in the world in terms of number of sales handled. The basic idea seems to be to transform Poste also into a platform capable of catalysing and integrating e-commerce, payments, logistics and services. The revolution that CEO Matteo Del Fante and MD Giuseppe Lasco have launched in logistics was summarised in an interview with IlSole24Ore over a year ago. Already on that occasion it was explained that the challenge to be overcome would be the new contract to be signed with the trade unions (which then took place) in order to comply with the high quality standards required by the group's customer platforms, such as Amazon, Zalando, Vinted, and therefore to be able to deliver even on Sundays and holidays. The 25,000 postmen have been asked for more flexibility in their working hours. The group's strategy is to increasingly increase the number of parcels delivered by the postmen themselves and reduce the use of external personnel and couriers in order to achieve cost synergies. "We are number one in Italy on deliveries to retail (B2C). This means managing a relationship with Amazon, which is our first customer, but also our first competitor,' Del Fante explained. We are first among logistics operators, but in terms of volume in B2C the first is Amazon, which delivers its own parcels and decides with whom to make deliveries. It is a relationship to be managed step by step'. This will not be enough: the company will have to try to increase revenues in logistics, to compensate for the physiological downward trend in mail. "Our business," said the CEO, "pivots on the last mile of parcel delivery. But this exposes us too much to competition from Amazon: it has a market share of over 60 per cent in this country, and between 40 and 50 per cent in the rest of Europe. Sales are concentrated on his platform and he chooses who to deliver with'.

The idea is therefore to 'open up to the international market, which we will do with Dhl (the jv became operational in the weeks, ed.) by creating a joint hub with Poste in Italy and accessing their network abroad'. Then there is the business to business market. 'Today we are the only ones with an integrated business,' the manager recounted, 'We are the most organised logistics operators, having also cargo (air transport with the company Mistral, which has been profitable for three years, ed.), the courier Sda and Sennder, in road transport, in which we are shareholders. We carried out a share swap, converting the shares of Sennder Italia with those of Sennder Gmbh: we are now 11% shareholders of the leading European operator in the sector. We entered the pharmaceuticals delivery business with the acquisition of Plurima. From the transport of drugs, which required an agreement with Italtrans (which has a fleet with refrigerators), we have moved into cold food deliveries'.