IGTA Journal - Winter 2020/2021

Germany, Interview: “ Our Focus is clearly on organic gro wth” Melanie Kreis, CFO of Deutsche Post DHL, about the effects of the Corona crisis on the Group, the future of online-commerce, and the transport of wedding clothes. The interview is not addressing developments after December 12, 2020. from the Börsen-Zeitung, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, December 12, 2020, article provided by GEFIU, Association of Chief Financial Officers Germany, the German IGTA Member Association Mrs. Kreis, the Corona crisis has strongly changed the day to day work of Deutsche Post DHL Group . Which adaptations have caused the highest costs ? These were the changes in our airline flight network. We are having in our Express-Division a dedicated airplane fleet with over 260 large planes. Here, across the entire year, we had to continuously make adaptations. In which way ? Since the second quarter, we had the challenge, that because of the spreading of the pandemic, the worldwide passenger flight traffic was massively reduced. Until then we have used the cargo space of these passenger planes, to fly to destinations, for instance like Africa, where a dedicated network flight for us was not economical. So we were confronted with the question of how to deal with these capacities shortages. At the same time there were massive distortions on the demand side, for instance when suddenly personal protective equipment (PPE) from China had to be flown to the rest of the world. Can you estimate which additional costs, caused by Corona induced changes, had to be carried this year by the Group ? IGTA eJournal | Winter 2020/21 | 19