KARACHI, July 22: PIA chief Ahmad Saeed on Tuesday launched its premier value-added door-to-door courier service for one window operation to its customer, targeting all segments of society.

Beginning from three major economic cities in the country Karachi, Lahore and the twin cities of Islamabad/Rawalpindi, he said the “PIA Speedex courier service” would soon go into expansion to more important cities like Multan, Faisalabad, Sialkot, Gujranwala, Hyderabad, Sukkur, Peshawar, Quetta etc.

Addressing a function organised to launch the courier service, he said that every effort was being made to translate small ideas into revenue-generating concerns.

He said PIA was loaded with excesses manpower and efforts were being made to create jobs for them to make them productive for the organisation.

Replying to questions, Mr Saeed said that as PIA had all advantages aircraft, offices and technology their investment in the service was not more

than fifty to sixty million rupees and in the next year a four to five per cent profit was expected.

“There is no authentic report of the total market of the courier service, but a rough estimate indicates around two billion rupees and our target share will be 20 per cent,” he said.

Highlighting the technology available, he said that Speedex was equipped with the most modern and state-of-art technology shipments booked at Karachi could be checked at Islamabad within seconds after booking.

“Using PIA’s own fleet of aircraft with 204 weekly flights, Speedex has unlimited options to offer the best and shortest transit times with services such as same-day speed, overnight speed, and second-day speed,” he said and added that with the infrastructure of PIA Speedex would offer certain unique services like time definite deliveries, holiday deliveries, fragile handling and edible carriage services.