Ten years of TNT
“If there’s life, there is mail and if there’s mail, we’re there.” That was the motto the TNT Post Group used to celebrate its independent listing on the stock exchange on 29 June 1998. On the posters we see a moon landscape featuring a red Dutch postbox. A new company is born! A company enjoying a heritage of 200 years’ experience in mail and 60 years in express and logistics.
1998 - 2008
The stock exchange listing, and everything that came after
In its first year, the company experienced yet another historical event – the opening of five spanking-new letter sorting centres. From that moment on, 80% of the mail in the Netherlands would be automatically sorted, more than anywhere else in the world. A few months later, in honour of its 200th anniversary Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands granted TNT Post the right to used the predicate ‘Royal’.
In the years that followed, the company acquired one company after another, some in express (Jet Services) and some in logistics (Tecnologistica, CTI). In 1999, the Board of Management decided to structure the company in three separate divisions, delegating a part of the management tasks to each. In 2001, Peter Bakker succeeded Ad Scheepbouwer as CEO. A year later, the company announced its partnership with the UN World Food Programme, under which it would deploy its people, resources and skills to help WFP in the fight against world hunger. This marked the start of a new course in TNT'’s social policy, making social responsibility an integral part of the way we do business.
During these years, the divisions were also working hard to address a range of operational issues. At Express, improving margins was a key topic. In Mail, the basis was laid for the first generation of master plans, a series of cost-saving measures aimed at dealing with lower postal volumes. Logistics worked hard to integrate the companies that had been taken over. The acquisition of Wilson in 2004 was a first step for TNT in the direction of freight management. With the opening of a new head office in Shanghai the ambitions of TNT in China were given extra focus.
In 2005, the company announced its refined strategy: Focus on Networks. The key elements of this strategy were the decision to have the company focus on the network operations Express and Mail, and the proposal to divest the Logistics division and for TNT to buy back €1 billion of its own shares. The Logistics division was purchased by private equity fund Apollo Management L.P. in September of that year, and in November it appeared that the company would also be selling its Freight Management business. The Focus on Networks strategy also heralded TNT’s increasing focus on emerging markets. The acquisition of Hoau (China, 2006), Speedage (India, 2006) and Mercúrio (Brazil, 2007) laid the foundations for developing domestic networks in these countries.
In January 2007 TNT launched Planet Me, a programme to reduce the company’s CO2 emissions in a wide variety of ways. In September it was announced that, for the third year running, TNT ranked first in its industry on the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, a list that tracks sustainability leaders among the largest companies in the world. What’s more, TNT had the highest score of any company on the DJSI.
It is now 2008; TNT N.V. has been around for ten years and is preparing for the next ten.