Pakistan has delayed the sale of beleaguered Pakistan International Airways (PIA) until autumn, as investors seek clarification on the books and on the potential return of service to Europe.
PIA Sale Delayed Until September
The economy of Pakistan is at a precarious crossroads and to stabilize spending and generate revenue, Pakistan plans to private flag carrier PIA. PIA has not been profitable for 20 years (beyond its lucrative hotel in New York City…) and has amassed nearly 1 billion USD in debt.
PIA is currently banned from travel to the United States, United Kingdom, and European Union due to lingering concerns over the carriers’ safety record (after a 2020 crash in Karachi killed 100 passengers and was blamed on pilot error). Those flight bans purportedly cost the carrier close to 150 million USD in revenue each year.
While PIA still operates to Canada, flight attendants routinely “disappear” never to return, underscoring the economic plight of many in Pakistan, even those who have what are considered plum jobs.
The planned sale of PIA this summer has been postponed as potential investors seek more information about the real state of the carrier:
“Pakistan has delayed the final auction for state-owned Pakistan International Airlines by two months until the end of September after potential bidders sought more information to assess the carrier, according to people familiar with the matter.”
Pakistan currently owns 100% of PIA and will sell a 51% stake to a private investor.
With intense regional competition without the high legacy overhead costs of PIA, PIA’s long-term recovery is pegged toward a return to longhaul service.
But is PIA just another perpetually unprofitable South African Airways or Alitalia? Or could it be the next Air India and revitalize after years of decline?
CONCLUSION
Pakistan will push its sale of PIA until September as investors seek more info on the balance sheet and concerning the possible return of service to Europe and the UK.
It’s fascinating to me to think that PIA is still utilizing the same Boeing 777 aircraft it was eight years ago when One Mile At A Time and I flew from Manchester to New York (full review).
> Read More: Pakistan Airlines 777 Business Class Manchester To New York Review
image: @pakistanintairlines / Instagram
This unfortunately likely means that they got no bids at all and the “extension” is really just trying again to sweeten the pot. Keeping the government of Pakistan as your 49% partner seems like a deal killer to me and last time I was in Pakistan late last year I avoided PIA because they didn’t have the cash to reliably by fuel and were cancelling many flights. The could sell 100% of the airline for $1.00 to a private party and still make the entire nation and traveling public far better off.
By the way, the dated SQ Spacebeds are sold as Economy Plus on the YYZ flights – this might be in part to get around onerous Pakistani taxes on business class airfare – and are a great bargain if one is traveling to Pakistan.
India was smart to dump Pakistan . UK is stupid dumb to import the third world , including Pakistan .
Now US is making the same stupid error , by importing the third world .
Import the third world … Become the third world .
@Alert It might surprise you that the average Indian American earns nearly twice as much – and pays more taxes – than the average “White American,” and the average Pakistani American earns about 50% more than the average American. The same is roughly true for people from China as well.
So in many ways you have it exactly backwards. If the US didn’t “import the third world,” it would become the third world, because native born Americans aren’t as fond of hard work as these third world immigrants, who pay an outsize portion of the tax base.
And the hospital emergency rooms are filled with white americans scamming the system ?
And the southern border is overrun with white americans carrying all sorts f diseases ?
The United States is possessed of politicians who try and get political advantage from immigrants such that they’ll let obvious criminals with Salvadoran MS-13 Gang tattoos in – while keeping skilled Indians and Chinese out – while forbidding them from doing honest work while paying for their food, clothing, housing, and healthcare and making them wards of the state with a lot of time for mischief. But if you want to know who is responsible for that insanity, look in the mirror. I’ve seen the enemy, and they are us, the people that were born here. . . not migrants who want to work for a living.
Immigrants — even the illegal entry ones — are less likely to perpetrate crimes in the US than people born in the US. The “giant sucking sound” of America is heard loudest by those from abroad seeking a better life and willing to work for it in the US.
This has historically been true, but the US government has never before been as reckless with who they let in and I am quite pessimistic that these statistics will continue. Immigration is a win-win for the United States and I think it would be a perfectly reasonable strategy to send plane tickets to any Indians or Chinese who want to immigrate – the best investment the US would every make. But I doubt we will have a positive ROI with those who are escaping jails in El Salvador or Venezuela. I think it’s also becoming a concern that people who crawled over glass to get here to work have been turned into welfare cases by being forbidden from doing legitimate work. Time will tell, but anecdotally it already doesn’t look too good. Our government can even manage to screw immigration up, and it seems that they have.
Reported violent crime under Biden has fallen to a near 50-year record low in the country. This low in violent crime has been achieved even with — or maybe even because of — all the irregular border crossings by migrants to the US.
Maybe irregular border crossings by migrants to the US is substantially lower now under Biden than it was when Trump was in his last full month at the White House? Either way, it seems like irregular migration isn’t the key to crime problems in the US.
The “third world” citizens who migrated legally from the big Asian countries to the US or legally adjusted their status in the US after entering legally have been a big gift to America. They pay far more in taxes per capita than the average European-American in Iowa, Missouri and Alabama. They are a major reason why Social Security is more solvent than it would otherwise be for the massive number of European-Americans dependent upon Social Security.
The brain-drain to America from “the third world” has been amazing for America. The “third world” paid for their education and then we benefit from the brightest and hardest working among them who are willing to uproot their lives at home to build a life in a new homeland.
By some estimates, if the Civil Rights Movement had not opened the door for legal immigration from the “third world” we would be paying at least 25% more for our already very expensive healthcare. If you favor more inflation, just say so — as that is what would have hit more than it already did if not for the Civil Rights Movement and the welcoming of legal immigration from non-European parts of “the Old World”.
That kind of inflation in health care costs would have bankrupted Medicare/Medicaid. But maybe your interest is in killing off Social Security so that more Americans die sooner than later, as that would be the consequence of killing off Social Security. And if you also support the killing off of Obamacare, then natural-born Americans would be even worse off.
I have a nagging suspicion that the lack of affordable healthcare correlates with increases in violence and other criminal activity. Do you love criminal activity and inflation? Then support the destruction of Social Security and more inflation by “close the borders”.
India didn’t dump Pakistan. What created Pakistan was a critical mass of insecure Indian Muslims who felt like India with a Hindu majority would turn out to be Hindu majoritarian fascist state or be part and parcel of a never-ending cycle of communal violence if remaining with India. The British encouraged the creation of a Pakistan carved out of India, and so the British military initially became the military leadership of Pakistan and Pakistan continued to have the British monarch as its head of state longer than India. The Hindu leadership of the Indian liberation movement went along with the carving out of Pakistan for various reasons. Not so surprisingly, there are now more Muslims in India than there are in Pakistan since most Muslims in India decided to stay in the lands that are as much their natural birthright as the lands are for Indian Hindus, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, animists, atheists, Jews and so on.
There is truth to this and it is under appreciated how Gandhi and Hindu nationalists gave the impression of wanting a Hindu religious state that Muslims understandably wanted no part of, but it ignores the massive ethnic unrest and race wars that had been going on in many Indian cities prior to Partition and made people flee in fear for their lives in both directions – and with good reason considering that millions of people lost their lives in ethnic violence – not even including the mass rapes of millions more – including not only Hindus and Muslims but also Sikhs who were arguably the most affected by Partition having had their homeland of Punjab sliced in two with most Sikhs living in what would soon become hostile Muslim Pakistan. Given current events today, one might think that the only colonial Partition that ever took place in the world was British Mandate of Palestine, but in fact there were many and India/Pakistan/Bangladesh makes that Partition seem rather mild in comparison. The largely fictional Gandhi movie that forms the Western basis for almost all of their “knowledge” about Indian Partition has misled, and continues to mislead, generations into ignorance of this history, made noble people into villains, and even more so, vice versa.
Didn’t mean to leave out the Jains and Zoroastrians. Zoroastrians have been instrumental in the Indian aviation and hotel sectors.
The majority of India’s Muslims then and now had neither the desire nor intent to leave their home areas within India and emigrate to what was set to be a Muslim version of Israel — except that the so-called religious homeland was to be carved from lands *within* what was already within reach for most Indians (of sufficient means of sufficient closeness) without needing government approval for “internal migration”.
Like PIA, Air India and El Al’s home countries, these countries’ flag carriers turned out to be both less and more than their modern state founders would have expected for their countries: more messed up and more religiously fundamentalist than their founders may have anticipated at the time.
But there’s more hope for at least the airlines: El Al privatized and now they fly on Saturday and are improving in some ways. Sort of the same for Air India with privatization. Maybe PIA has a chance to get better with privatization but it’s for more going against it than Air India and El Al have going against them.