The story
The PIN Group originally traded under the name Briefdienstleistungsunternehmen PIN intelligente Dienstleistungen AG, a postal services company founded in 1999 in Berlin. In 2004, Axel Springer AG and the Holtzbrinck Publishing Group each bought a majority shareholding of 30% from the company founders and venture capital company DKB Wagniskapital GmbH. In October 2005 the remaining shares of the PIN founders were acquired by WAZ-Mediengruppe and the Luxembourg investment company Rosalia Investment S.A. before founding the PIN Group. In the summer of 2006 the newspaper publishers Madsack, M. DuMont Schauberg, Rheinisch-Bergische
Verlagsgesellschaft and W. Girardet merged their postal services divisions into the company, receiving in return a 10% holding of PIN Group AG. Following the takeover of Briefnetz Süd GmbH & Co. KG (BNS), a consortium of postal services providers owned by 12 newspaper publishers in Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg, since April 2007 the PIN Group has operated a mail delivery network throughout the whole of Germany. To offer delivery services to German authorities and government departments, the PIN Group acquired Ulm-based postal services provider DirektExpress.
Since June 2007, the majority shareholder in the PIN Group has been the Axel Springer publishing company, after raising its holding from 23.5% to 71.6%. Axel Springer bought these shares from WAZ, Holtzbrinck and Rosalia for €510 million.
The holding company, PIN Group S.A. is responsible for laying down the strategy of the entire corporate affiliation and planning day-to-day operations, which are managed and organised by the German subsidiaries and shareholding companies.
In February 2007 around 7000 people worked for the PIN Group. The chairman of the executive board, Günter Thiel announced that the company planned to expand to more than 20,000 employees by the end of 2007
In the autumn of 2007 PIN Group successfully acquired business from a variety of Germany cooperative savings banks.
In November 2007, the German coalition government set the minimum wage for postal workers at €8 to €9.80 per hour. Due to the cost squeeze on owner Axel Springer, the company was quoted by the German Financial Times as examining "a variety of options" ranging from selling the company to closing down operations entirely. On 5 Dec 2007, PIN Group subsequently announced it was to lay off 1000 employees, more than 1/10 of the workforce, simultaneously criticising the German government for "consciously taking into account that investments worth billions to Germany... would go to waste". In his 2007 Christmas address to the nation, German President Horst Köhler described the introduction of the minimum wage in the postal sector as "risky", stating that "a minimum wage that can not be paid by competitive employers destroys jobs".
The PIN Group CEO, Günter Thiel, resigned his position on 17 Dec 2007 after Axel Springer Publishing turned down his offer to buy its remaining 63.7% share in the company. His plan had been to continue to manage the company under his own finances.
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On 29 December 2007 the delivery company saarriva, which is based in the German State of Saarland and is partly owned by PIN Group filed for bankruptcy.
On 23 January 2008 it was announced by Horst Piepenburg, the newly appointed chairman, that PIN would agree to pay its workers the newly defined minimum wage which had been set at €9.80 per hour.
Reports at the end of January 2008 stated that chairman Horst Piepenburg had entered discussions with American holdings, including the Blackstone Group, KKR and Advent International, although the company subsequently denied the claim.
It is now bankrupt.
From Wikipedia’s article on PIN Group, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4