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Article Excerpt
OPERATOR: Good day and welcome to the Deutsche Post DHL Group Strategy 2015 conference call. For your information, today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Martin Ziegenbalg, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.
MARTIN ZIEGENBALG, HEAD OF IR, DEUTSCHE POST WORLD NET: Thank you and a warm welcome to everyone out there on Deutsche Post DHL's call today. I've got with me here our CEO, Frank Appel, who's going to take you through the presentation that we have sent around earlier. And for the Q&A later on, we will also have John Allan, our CFO, available.
You may have noticed that we are pretty constrained on time. I take it that some of you had a chance to follow the webcast of the press conference earlier today. But for those only getting to office now, we would like now to start right away and let me hand over to Frank, please.
FRANK APPEL, CEO, DEUTSCHE POST WORLD NET: Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us this afternoon.
If I go through the presentation you probably will see or have received upfront, where we start, what is the purpose of that somehow in what we do today? We had last week our internal kickoff at our top executive meeting, where we really launched and had a broad support for what we -- what I will outline in a minute and what was outlined and jointly agreed in the corporate board. We today announced more or less some of the measures. And the most visible measure is somehow that we will rebrand the Company, but I will come to that later on. More details about what we do here you will hear, then, on May 6, when we want to do a Capital Markets Day.
If I go back, then, or turn the page to page two, we are convinced that this is a great company and I will come to -- later on to some performances you might face. So the story I want to tell you today is much more about what we plan to do. It's not an acquisition plan. It's not a restructuring plan. It's not we have to grow the business here and there. It's much more about how we make, out of this Company and our industry, something which is unique in comparison to our competitors. So being, from our perspective, with a global footprint is quite a lot.
And if you go then to page three, you see that our market positions across the board are second to none. We are really in all businesses, be it mail domestic Germany or cross-border air and ocean freight, European road, international express, contract logistics or even the document management, which we call information solutions, we are everywhere, in the respective markets, number one or at least number two. And I think that is the key issue. If you talk about the strategy, obviously there is not a problem with being not in a good market position.
If you then turn to page four, this strategy is also not about to launch another program. I think we have exactly the right programs in place, which we will leverage later on as well, if I come to a little bit the parts of the strategy. We have First Choice, our Six Sigma lean management approach, exactly the right tool for engaging our employees much more, for getting more customer-oriented, to optimize our processes.
With our employee opinion survey, we have an -- two years now in a row, we have now a facts base where we have to improve. And in a service company like ours, customer satisfaction is very much driven by what employees do. And you can read a lot of textbooks and you will always find that, if you have more satisfied employees, that will drive then more customer satisfaction and more customer satisfaction will drive more employee satisfaction. So to have measures in place to improve our employee satisfaction, I think it's important that you know where you stand.
The third is our famous Roadmap to Value program, where we have done quite a lot on that already and we will proceed. I think it was terrific that we have already such a program in place, so we can just accelerate what we are doing there without creating new ones. New programs are always a threat to an organization, because they don't understand why you launch another program, so we don't have to do that.
And then we have the Go Green program, our carbon reduction program, which I think is important because the financial crisis and the market crisis will be over sooner or later. The carbon emission problem will last a little bit longer.
The good news now, on page five, is that these markets were quite attractive and you all know that, quite attractive and have grown faster than the GDP. So now we have at the moment a little bit different situation. Obviously, the markets are shrinking quite a lot. But we are deeply convinced that the trend that Chinese and Indians want to buy more goods is not broken and that will come back sooner or later and then we will see a recovery of the demand as well. And then we assume that our business will again grow faster than the market.
The question is then, on page six, what is the short-term outlook? You can now lengthy discuss. I think Ken Allen, our new Express head, summarized it probably the best way - hope for the best and prepare for the worst. So the best is probably a V-shape and we can hope that. But it's better to prepare for an L-type recession, with the additional challenge that we should not lose good talent now which we might re-get in a couple of months if a V-shape comes and then we have not the right people.
So the challenge for the organization will be to take costs out as relentless as possible without losing the important talent in our organization. And that will be a challenge. There might be different ways to achieve that, by reducing salaries or taking salary cuts instead of laying off people. But that will be done more or less country by country. We don't give central instruction. We just do give them targets for cost reductions, but how they achieve that is then their goal.
So if you all take that together and if we switch to page seven, we have short-term challenges. But after we did our homework last year with the US Express on the one hand and the Postbank sale, we are in markets which are fundamentally growing markets and we are also well-positioned in these markets. So why have we not unlocked the potential of this Company yet? And I think there are a couple of reasons and we always have to talk about the three bottom lines as, I think, a senior management team.
Although we are a good provider, we are not unique in any of our industries. So we are soon as good provider, but I have the ambition that we're becoming unique and how we want to achieve that I will tell you later on. The same is true for employer of choice. We are not worse than benchmarks, but we are also not best in class. And I think there is a long way to go and employee engagement is pretty important for a service-oriented company. And thirdly, you know better than anybody else our stock definitely was not the investment of choice in the last years and I think we have to do something fundamentally that we improve that performance. So, overall, that's the point.
So when we now go forward, we are deeply convinced that we should build our Company on two strong pillars. One is the Deutsche Post. The important thing here is that we want to say -- and that's shown on page eight. We want to give our people who are...
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