The deal, announced Monday (Feb. 9), was made by an investor group led by FedEx and private equity group Advent International.
“FedEx has a global network that powers the industrial economy, and InPost has a strong and successful presence in Europe’s out-of-home delivery segment,” FedEx CEO Raj Subramaniam said in a news release.
“We will be entering into agreements with InPost following completion of the transaction that will provide our customers access to InPost’s last-mile B2C capabilities while bringing FedEx’s global network and logistics expertise to support InPost’s next phase of growth.”
The release describes InPost as a “leading European e-commerce enabler,” offering parcel pickup solutions that “generate profitable last-mile business-to-consumer (B2C) shipments.”
Under the terms of the deal, Advent and FedEx will each control a 37% stake in InPost. An investment company run by InPost founder and CEO Rafał Brzoska will own 16% and Czech investment firm PPF will hold the remaining 10%.
Advent had purchased a majority stake in InPost from Brzoska in 2017 before taking the company public in 2021, in a listing that valued InPost at 8 billion euros.
According to a report on the deal by the Financial Times (FT), Hein Pretorius, chair of InPost’s supervisory board, was asked during a news conference why shareholders should accept a deal valuing InPost at a lower figure than 2021. He replied that “each transaction stands on its own merits … the IPO was some time ago and under different circumstances.”
Meanwhile, PYMNTS wrote recently about FedEx’s bet on “resilience and adaptability” over “raw volume in a world beset by uncertainty.”
The company had just released quarterly results that showed that wager bearing fruit, with revenue up 7% year over year to $23.5 billion.
“But the deeper story lies beneath those figures, in how FedEx is reshaping itself to compete in a logistics market that no longer rewards scale alone,” that report said.
“As FedEx executives repeatedly stressed to investors, the company is in the midst of one of the most ambitious corporate rewrites in modern logistics: the dismantling of a decades-old operating model in favor of a unified, data-driven network designed to survive, and profit from, what leadership sees as ongoing volatility.”
