SHAH ALAM (Dec 8): PosLaju, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Pos Malaysia Bhd is planning to spend up to RM200 million to build three more integrated parcel centres or IPCs to expand its express and courier service's capacity.

PosLaju currently has one IPC here, which it termed as a "fully-automated" centre as it relies heavily on automated sorting machines, with just 20% manual intervention.

Pos Malaysia's head of courier postal & courier commercial Zumy Zuheidy Md Suhor said the expansion is deemed necessary in the face of the tremendous growth of e-commerce and to enhance its services as the main postal provider in Malaysia.

"With the majority of customers from the corporate sector, robust technology and e-commerce growth have led to a rapid increase in demand. We are trying to process more courier items per day to increase our service level agreement in order for us to deliver the courier items the next day to recipients," he said during the media tour at IPC here today.

The three upcoming IPCs will be based in Prai, Penang, Johor Bahru, Johor, and at its National Mail Centre here in Shah Alam. The last will actually be an extension of its existing IPC at the same location, which will be named IPC 2. Construction works will start between 2017 and 2018.

"We don't need to worry about the land. We will only buy the machines and use our existing mail processing centre to do the expansion and renovation for these new IPCs," he said.

The three new IPCs will provide PosLaju the additional capacity to process up to 1.5 million courier items per day by 2018. Nationwide, PosLaju currrently processes up to 400,000 courier items a day.

Pos Malaysia shares closed down three sen or 0.77% at RM3.88 today, for a market capitalisation of RM3.04 billion.