The German engineer who runs the most international company in the world, with nearly 600,000 employees across more than 220 countries and territories, lived through a war that drove up fuel costs and knocked its Bahrain operations hub out of service. And he says that, in the end, European regulation took up more of his management team’s time than all those crises combined.
When the conflict in the Middle East escalated, Tobias Meyer lost access to his operations hub in Bahrain, which had served the company well for years.
He moved flights to Riyadh and Muscat. He activated a trucking network the company had been building across the region for four decades. He contracted additional ground capacity to move containers from ports in Oman and the Red Sea to the rest of the Gulf. Meanwhile, aviation fuel prices were soaring.
Even under those circumstances, the quarter ended better than the market had expected and DHL raised its earnings outlook for the year.
But if Meyer is asked what has consumed the most time for his management team in recent years, he does not mention any of that.
A joke about lawyers
Some time ago, he opened a speech before a room full of competition lawyers with a confession and a joke.
He says he felt a little out of place and joked that he had probably never been in a room with so many lawyers. Then he recalled something he had once been told: when a CEO finds himself surrounded by lawyers and journalists, it is usually a sign that trouble is coming.
He then spoke at length about paperwork and listed what he had had to manage —the pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the conflict in Israel and Gaza, the Red Sea crisis— and said that his senior management team had spent considerably less time on all of that than on dealing with growing regulation. His calculation on Europe, however, is blunt: what gets added in a year is at least five times what gets removed.
Tobias Meyer studied industrial engineering at the Technical University of Darmstadt and earned his doctorate there in mechanical engineering. Before joining DHL, he was a McKinsey partner working between Frankfurt and Singapore. He joined the company in a strategy role and gradually moved closer to operations, taking responsibility for international freight, systems for the German postal business and, from 2019, a seat on the Board of Management. He has been CEO since May 2023 of a group that generated around €82 billion in revenue that year and operates in so many countries that he himself jokes that he did not even know there were that many.
He defines his mission this way: facilitating global trade. And he accepts the uncomfortable consequences of that definition. DHL operates practically everywhere in the world, including several tax havens. Meyer says its presence there serves the same purpose as in any other market: moving freight and documents wherever there is a customer.
To explain his criticism, Meyer often brings the discussion down to concrete examples. One involves DHL’s electric vehicles. If a van delivers parcels without emitting carbon, the investment can qualify as sustainable under the European taxonomy. But if it uses winter tires, which generate plastic particles and noise, it may cease to meet the criteria and the entire investment can lose that classification. Meyer asks, with an engineer’s logic, whether deliveries should therefore be made only with summer tires and the tires changed afterward, but says that this is effectively what they end up doing in order to classify the investment.
Two. If they build a carbon-neutral building in Mexico, it qualifies as such only if the toilets meet European water-saving standards.
Three. To report on the company’s workforce in Argentina, he has to explain to his Argentine colleagues that the way they have been treating people with disabilities does not fit the European categorization, so either they change their approach or he has to do the work twice.
That is where his deeper concern comes from. It is not an accounting issue but a diplomatic one, because he is uncomfortable with European standards being applied to operations in Fiji, Mexico or Panama. He understands Brussels’ frustration at being unable to advance these issues in multilateral forums, but he does not agree that the answer is to impose European morality through trade rules. And he gives the number that sums up his argument: Europe represents 5% of the world’s population, and some of its partners elsewhere no longer want that 5% telling them what to do.
His evidence that this shift has already happened is visible in everyday life: just look at the cars now driving through the streets of Dubai. He says his counterparts in the Middle East, Latin America and Africa find it difficult to deal with Europeans and easy to deal with the Chinese, and that Europe is less concerned about this than it should be.
The customer that competes
Amazon is both its largest customer and a growing competitor. Meyer does not treat it as an enemy; on the contrary, he takes the time to explain why Amazon moved into logistics. One has to remember the difficult experience it had with US carriers and the postal service between 2012 and 2014, when many packages failed to arrive by Christmas. He also acknowledges that Amazon came up with good ideas, such as box-free returns. He was not convinced at first, but eventually accepted them when he saw how much they simplified life for customers.
When it comes to pricing, he describes the relationship almost sympathetically: we tell them what it costs, they say that if they do not like the price they will go somewhere else, sometimes they actually do, and at some point an agreement is reached. He says that is the kind of competition he enjoys.
What he does not like, he says more sharply: when DHL’s parcel lockers suddenly stop appearing as an option on the customer’s website and consumers can no longer choose them. Meyer says it could always be a technical failure, although he does not rule out another explanation. That is why he believes it is appropriate for the authorities to examine it.
With traditional mail, by contrast, he sees little value in competition. He issues a challenge: name a single market anywhere in the world where postal competition has produced a good result. One. The United States never privatized the sector and the United Kingdom, he says, is a disaster. He warns that if the business is made unattractive enough, DHL will leave it and the state will then have to work out how to serve citizens who still want the service.
The battle in front of him once again comes back to bureaucracy: Europe ended the minimum exemption threshold for imported parcels, and his objection is not to the underlying goal but to the way it is being implemented —additional data to collect, a minimum tariff per item and, later, a handling fee. Meyer asks why two instruments are needed to achieve the same thing. It is one of three risks keeping him cautious this year, alongside the Middle East and US tariffs, even though DHL has just improved its outlook.
His criticism of regulation does not come from denying the environmental problem. The company generates around 33 million metric tons of CO₂e a year, a figure he compares with Denmark’s annual emissions. He takes that seriously and would like to do more.
That is exactly his point. Between restrictions on manufacturers, fuel quotas, road tolls and limits on the electricity grid, when it comes to decarbonizing heavy trucks, almost nothing remains that is both economically viable and legally possible.
