The Bureau d'études des postes et télécommunications d'outre-mer (BEPTOM, Office of Oversea Posts and Telecommunications Studies in English) was a French public institution, financially autonomous. Linked to the French Minister of Cooperation, its goal was to help in the postal and telecommunication areas the French Overseas territories and the newly independent states that asked for it. It operated from 1956 until late 1994.
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In philately, the office was notable as the postage stamp agency and printer of the late French colonies. It sold these issues to collectors at an agency in Paris.
Concerning telecommunications, its action was limited by the competition from French private companies in Francophone Africa.
History
From 1956, French Overseas posts and telecommunications were reorganized and decentralized consequently to the independence of the protectorates of Morocco and Tunisia, and in prevision of the independence of other oversea territories.
During this process, the Bureau d'études des postes et télécommunications d'outre-mer was created. It can intervene when asked by oversea territories and independent states thank to four internal services.
The postage stamp service prepared philatelic products. The operation and juridic affair service helped to organize postal and telecommunication networks in these countries, including the redaction of regulations and laws. The technical purchase service centralized orders from different countries to bargain over prices with French firms. The technical cooperation service trained the managers at CIPEC-PT, a post and telecommunication school in Toulouse. The CIPEC-PT declined with the opening of specialized training schools in Africa.
In 1991, the general inspection wrote a report for the Minister of Industry about the post and telecommunication cooperation. Then, discussions with public and private actors of the sectors in France and Africa concluded to the disappearance of the BEPTOM, officially on 1 January 1995 following a decree signed by Prime Minister Édouard Balladur on 22 December 1995.
Actions in the postal sector
The BEPTOM help to install, maintain and regulate postal networks included the creation of postage stamps if the territories and countries asked for it. If they kept the choice of the subjects depicted on stamps, the BEPTOM brought the necessary expertise: French stamp designers and engravers and the French Post' printer plant, the Imprimerie des timbres-poste et des valeurs fiduciaires.
The Agence des timbres-poste d'outre-mer (ATPOM, Overseas Postage Stamp Agency), located avenue de la Bourdonnais in Paris, sold the stamps to collectors. It was a continuous activity started by the Minister of Colonies in the 1894, then at the Pavillon de Flore in the Louvre Palace, and after at different addresses: 10 rue du Mont-Thabor, rue Vaneau and 80 rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis. African post offices promoted their philately at low cost because the French philatelic press and stamp dealers contacted directly the ATPOM.
At the beginning of the 1990s, the oversea territories and African countries' post offices were inform of the project to close the BEPTOM. La Poste postage stamp agency, the Postage Stamp and Philately National Service, proposed its printing service to the Overseas collectivities, its subsidiaries in Mayotte and Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon and the independent public postal operators in New Caledonia, French Polynesia and Wallis-et-Futuna.
In Africa, BEPTOM helped post offices took two ways on the market of postage stamp creation: either they hired printers to print their philatelic program, or they gave an agency the contract of creating, printing and selling this program. Depending on the countries' financial possibilities and need in postage stamps for their interior market, some kept a controlled policy of stamp issues like Mali that hired reputed printers like Courvoisier and the Tunisian post. Others lost control of their issuing policy like Burkina Faso: agencies proposed on the philatelic market lots of stamps without any thematical links to the country. From the creation of the WADP Numbering System (WNS) and the discovery of illegal stamps, never ordered by the countries they bore the name, former BEPTOM helped countries in Francophone Africa had retook charge of their philatelic programs.
Actions in the telecommunication sector
By its actions financed partly with public subventions and unbilled to the helped countries, the BEPTOM competited with the Société française d'études de télécommunications and France Câbles et Radio, even if the latter controlled the international communication market of around fifteen countries without financing and maintaining the interior network. Progressively, to respect competitors, the BEPTOM limited itself to urgency interventions and to help privatized France Télécom take step in these markets.
After the BEPTOM disappeared, French associations, such as CSDPTT, continued the cooperative actions in Africa.