There has been talk about the potential sale of InPost for a long time. It has finally materialized – the famous company will be taken over by a consortium of Advent International, FedEx, A&R Investments and PPF.
Look: InPost sold. Rafał Brzoska comments
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The company will have new owners, but it will retain much of its “Polishness”. According to the statement, it is to maintain “its operational independence, brand and current business model.” Key people – including Rafał Brzoska – are to remain in their positions, and the headquarters will still be on the Vistula River.
Theoretically, not much should change for the customers of the company, which has been quite international for years — is still listed on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, and the Czech Renáta Kellnerová has recently played a very important role in it.
When asked what will change for customers, InPost representatives refer to the press release. Most of the companies from the consortium are representatives of the financial industry, so no, the transaction should not significantly affect the market situation in terms of competitiveness — there is probably no fear that InPost will gain too much of a position there.
There is also no information that the transaction was therefore under the supervision of the Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (although we are still waiting for the Office's response in this matter). However, the consortium included an “industry” company, i.e. FedEx. This American company, which is one of the giants of the parcel and postal market, is relatively unknown in Poland.
The American giant enters parcel lockers
It is very likely that FedEx will want to use its participation in the consortium to expand into our market. The agreement also assumes “connection of the global FedEx network, covering 3 million corporate customers and 225 million recipients around the world, with the network of InPost Paczkomat machines.”
“On the European market, this arrangement may further intensify competition, which is already under strong pressure from Amazon, which is developing its own shipping services, which is particularly visible in Great Britain, Italy, France and Germany. For the largest operators, especially DHL, combining the intercontinental power of FedEx with the low-cost first and last mile of InPost may prove to be a challenge difficult to neutralize,” says Mateusz Pycia, president of Globkurier.
What else might change? The logistics industry has no doubt that the transaction is not about the Polish market. “InPost has been developing in Europe for a long time – and it was certainly not the company's position in Poland that was the main motivation for this transaction,” our interlocutor from the logistics industry, who prefers to remain anonymous, tells us.
The company is already in nine markets and has almost 95,000. machines (including 61 thousand parcel lockers and 33 thousand other devices). The key market for InPost's development is now, among others, Great Britain. But the company did not really hide its ambitions to expand to non-European markets. The company tried to establish itself, for example, in Colombia or Canada. Not much came of it, but now InPost will have greater opportunities to conquer other markets.
Will InPost be a “global” player?
Our interlocutors believe that the transaction may lead to InPost becoming a global player in the long run – and Poland may be the center of the “parcel locker revolution”. After all, the company's solutions are liked by customers in Poland and other countries – and such a business can theoretically be further scaled quickly. This can bring tangible benefits to the Polish economy – it is on the Vistula River that truly “world-class” logistics solutions can be created. And despite the dynamic development of our economy, Poland actually does not have large companies that are known all over the world. Who knows, maybe InPost will be the first.
The threat to customers is, of course, that InPost will become so powerful that it will be difficult for other players to compete with it. For now, however, this is a distant prospect. The Polish courier and logistics market is red hot, which means that the prices of services are not very high.
As for the parcel machines themselves, with which InPost is so closely associated, there are currently over 60,000 of them in Poland. InPost owns approximately 27,000 of them. Chains such as DHL, Orlen and Allegro are also developing. Interestingly, InPost is not the only Polish company that wants to “export” such a solution abroad. Orlen, for example at its German stations, is increasingly relying on automatic machines. According to the company's press office, parcel machines are already operating at over 200 stations in Germany belonging to Orlen.
See also: InPost's competitor is growing near Biedronka. There are so many machines
For now, customers of vending machines or other InPost solutions should not be afraid of larger service increases. A tangible effect of the company's development abroad may be that it will become increasingly easier to send parcels from Poland to people who, for example, have family in Great Britain or go on holiday to Spain.
Author: Mateusz Madejski, journalist of Business Insider Polska
