INTRODUCING Klaus Zumwinkel, chairman and chief executive of Deutsche Post, the German logistics giant — you won’t have heard of him, but this is the man who wants to deliver your letters. If, that is, he can get a foothold in the British mail market.

Zumwinkel, a silver-haired, smooth-tongued, global super-executive, has spent the past 13 years transforming the old German state post office into the world’s biggest express delivery and logistics company — owner of the DHL and Danzas brands, and recent purchaser of Securicor Omega over here. Next, he wants to push his firm into every letter delivery market in Europe as each opens up to competition. His vision: to pop your parcels and letters from pillar to post with, dare I say it, Teutonic efficiency.

But guess what? We Brits are already in a tangle about how we are going to let the likes of Deutsche Post and its great rival TPG, which runs the Dutch postal service, get their feet in the door of our precious mail system.

The problem, says Zumwinkel, with just a hint of exasperation, is that his firm can only run a service if it can utilise Royal Mail’s home delivery system — you don’t want rival posties on the beat — and that can only work if they can find out how much Royal Mail will charge them for carrying post. And Royal Mail is contesting the charges set by the British postal regulator. Result? Confusion and delay.

“We want to bring another choice to customers here,” says Zumwinkel with a sigh, “and we want to use Royal Mail for the last mile. That is normal. In most other countries, like the Netherlands and Germany, there is a price list for using this kind of delivery system. And we have a licence to do that, but the pricing regime and all the stuff between Royal Mail and the regulator — it’s a mess.”

Well, that’s Britain for you. Zumwinkel, of course, is not really aiming to sell to you and me, but to business customers who provide four-fifths of mail by volume. And to be fair, he knows just how painful it is separating a state monopoly from its market — he’s run one himself in Germany. But his transformation of the German post office into Deutsche Post World Net, a partly privatised global delivery leviathan, is beyond the ken of those of us who read daily about Royal Mail’s big losses and constant strike disruption.

Zumwinkel now operates in a very different world. Last week he squeezed a day in London between 24 hours each in Stockholm and Amsterdam — indicative of the German post office’s growing ambitions. Corporate communications chief to one side of him, UK subsidiary boss to the other, beyond him a media manager taking notes, PR people thronging the corridor, he gave what amounted to a regal audience sitting behind a vast, shiny table in a palatial meeting room in an exceedingly posh Knightsbridge hotel overlooking Hyde Park. Anyone stumbling in from Royal Mail might just wonder what on earth was going on.

Well, if they didn’t know Deutsche Post was coming, they do now. Zumwinkel — forget the fact his name sounds like a Mel Brooks character, he’s actually a McKinsey-trained finance whiz — was in town to help elucidate exactly what his firm’s intentions are.

In short, it wants to compete. Using the DHL brand and backed by a group turnover of ¤39 billion (£27 billion), it already straddles the globe, but despite getting a licence to take on the Royal Mail, it can’t get started here. “I need a transparent pricing regime, then I can decide what we are going to do,” he says, raising his hands. And he puffs out his cheeks.

Slim, medium-height with grey hair pushed back, Sven Goran-style, Zumwinkel, 59, is one of Germany’s best-known business figures. Always a careful political operator, he’s rather more savvy than your average state monopoly boss: American business school educated, 12 years at McKinsey consultants, with kids going through university in London — “I want them to have an international outlook” — he flits between his Cologne home, Bonn business base, Italian holiday estate and subsidiaries across Europe, America and now Asia with practised ease.

And he certainly doesn’t want to upset anyone here. He’s in Britain, he says, to help publicise the revamped DHL one-stop-shop brand — the “Coca-Cola of global cross-border express delivery”, as he calls it. Deutsche Post, it transpires, is not a name we are going to see much. Surprise, surprise.

“You like my tie?” grins Zumwinkel with a glint in his slate-grey eyes. It carries a rather hideous yellow-and-red striped DHL corporate design. He laughs. He’s been round the block enough to know that po-faced Germans with plans for world domination always make other Europeans twitchy.

But ask him nicely and he will admit that Germany has been quicker to work out the possibilities of European integration than most. The German postal market is opening for competition by 2007, and he just wants to offer Europe what his institution has been providing for Germany since the Middle Ages.