La Poste Investigation

As per Decision n° 20-D-06 of 2 April 2020, the French competition authority has accepted commitments from La Poste which ended a decade-long investigation about potentially abusive pricing practices in the sector of parcel deliveries.

La Poste, historical incumbent in the postal sector in France, has been targeted by a complaint of one of its main competitors for an array of potentially anticompetitive practices, including the pre-emption of delivery points, predatory pricing, and loyalty rebates.

We have assisted La Poste in addressing a number of issues raised by the FCA during the investigation and in particular in designing a “quasi-incremental” rebate scheme that would alleviate exclusionary concerns while maintaining the business logic favored by La Poste. We have also analyzed the objective justification of some individual contracts that retained some loyalty-inducing properties. We have submitted several technical notes during the investigation, assisted in the negotiation of the commitments, and presented the main conclusions of our analysis in the hearing.

The Compass Lexecon team included David Sevy, Thibaut de Bernard, and Alexandre Nouvel. They worked together with a team from La Poste, with Bernard Lesage, head of a legal department in the La Poste Group’s European and national regulation department, Denis Joram, head of the economics team, and a Bredin Prat team comprising Marie-Cécile Rameau, Anne Jussiaux, and Guillaume Vatin.