UPS Court Filing Signals Continued Interest in TNT Express
UPS Inc. signaled its continued interest in Netherlands-based package and freight carrier TNT — currently pledged to a merger with FedEx Corp. — by asking a European Union court to reverse a 2013 regulatory ruling that blocked UPS from acquiring the Dutch company.
UPS is asking the General Court of the European Union, based in Luxembourg, to undo the 2013 decision by the European Commission’s competition bureau, which ruled that the combination of the second- and third-largest package carriers in Europe would be harmful to competition. Two years after that action that scuttled UPS’ effort to buy TNT, FedEx offered 9 euros per share, or $4.9 billion, for TNT, a marginally profitable company, in a bid to boost the U.S. company’s presence in Europe and Asia. Unlike UPS, FedEx, the fourth-largest package carrier in Europe, won approval from the EC to combine with No. 3 TNT.
UPS filed its request to the court as FedEx and TNT are in the final stages of receiving regulatory approvals from government agencies in dozens of countries.
Among major countries, only China has yet to rule on the FedEx-TNT linkup, which the parties say they expect to complete in the first half of this year.
“The Commission committed an error of law and a manifest error of assessment when examining the likely price effects of the [UPS-TNT] concentration,” the UPS filing said in the Official Journal of Europe’s governing body, disputing a series of arguments made by the EC.
UPS maintained that the EC changed UPS’ data relating to economics of its TNT proposal without giving the U.S. company a chance to explain or rebut the changes. The U.S. company that leads the Transport Topics Top 100 list of the largest for-hire carriers in the U.S. and Canada also argued that the EC’s analysis didn’t provide evidence of effective pricing power.
UPS also claimed that the EC "committed manifest error of assessment when it concluded that competitors who are not close competitors could not expand to constrain effectively the merged entity in the foreseeable future.”
Spokesman Glenn Zaccrara at UPS declined to elaborate on the European filing.
