JEDDAH, 15 February 2006 — The Saudi Postal Corporation is now delivering 1.3 million mailboxes to residential buildings in the Makkah Province. “This step will hopefully be accomplished by the end of this year,” said SPC President Muhammad Saleh Benton.
This is the second step of the project titled “Wasel” that the SPC launched recently this year in Riyadh where it managed to deliver one million mailboxes to residential buildings. For an annual fee, residents can receive mail at these boxes rather than the local post office.
The Jeddah municipality will receive 700,000 of these mailboxes while the remaining 300,000 mailboxes will be installed in the Makkah municipality.
After installing the mailboxes in Makkah Province, the SPC will focus on the Eastern Province.
The SPC has assigned eight numbers to each region. The numbers will be assigned to the first position of the postal address to indicate which region to send the mail. The numbers also indicate the order by which residents in the eight regions will receive their mailboxes.
The new postal coding system will further parse each of the eight primary regions based on population density and assign them numbers, like zip codes in the United States. Until now, mail correspondence has been sent and received either through employers or by post office boxes.
“SPC will soon offer the service of delivering parcels, enhancing express mails and delivering postal remittances,” said Benton.
Meanwhile, other projects will run in order to help improve the postal service. These projects are such as the electronic mail sorting system, the electronic tracking of mail, tracking of ground and air transported parcels.
Benton concluded that “this will allow the Saudi post to compete not only on a national level, but also on an international level.”
