Despite being granted an interim licence to offer mail services to a small number of clients by postal regulator Postcomm, the Deutsche Post chief said the UK market was a mess.
The licence limits Deutsche Post to 40m items a year, half the amount Royal Mail handles in a day. Deutsche Post said it intended to pass 90% of the mail on to Royal Mail for delivery, with the remaining 10% delivered through its own subcontracted delivery services.
"We want to bring another choice to customers here... We have a licence to do that but the pricing regime and all the stuff between Royal Mail and the regulator -- it's a mess," Zumwinkel told the Sunday Times.
Zumwinkel was referring to the row between the Royal Mail and Postcomm over the charges the postal group can demand from rivals using its network.
Royal Mail has argued that Postcomm's proposals go too far by suggesting that Royal Mail will only be able to charge as little as 11陆p for a first-class letter.
Allan Leighton, the Royal Mail chairman, has described the charges as alarming. "We were alarmed at the way Postcomm was moving last autumn to an access price of 14p for Royal Mail against a full price for first and second class stamp basic postage of 28p and 20p."
"Postcomm's plans today propose an access price of just 11.5p, so the regulator has moved the access price even lower than we feared," he said.
Leighton said Royal Mail was prepared to give other firms access to its network, but at a "fair and realistic" commercial price.
Zumwinkel said that there had to be free and fair competition in the UK market and that barriers hindering competition must be removed.
"The Treaty of Rome says Europe is a common economic unit and nobody should hinder business from one country when they want to go into another. In Germany, we are always a little bit faster in the mail field -- we are slower in other fields... But at the end of the day there has to be free and fair competition," he told the paper.
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