Yemisi Izuora
The Managing Director of Med-View Airline, Alhaji Muneer Bankole, has said that by April, this year, the airline will expand its operations to Francophone countries within the West African States.
Also, in the next three months, the airline would be offering an initial public offering (IPO) to enable more investors buy into the company and raise additional funds.
The fast rising airline, had listed its 9,750,649,400 ordinary shares of 50 kobo each at N1.50 each on the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) on January 31, 2017.
Speaking in Lagos on the future plans of the Medview Airline, Bankole said the airline would expand its operations to Dakar (Senegal), Conakry (Guinea) and Abidjan (Cote D’Ivoire) in the next two months, noting that the airline has already commenced Lome (Togo) route.
He said: “We are in the market not to do anything extraordinary but to let all Nigerians know that there is something to grow together. This is a private entity that starts from zero. The durable, profitable and safest business you can do is transport.
“To carry cargo from Lagos to Abuja is 45 minutes; London is six hours even by ship you will be there for three months. It is the only way you can move people and communicate to the next neigbhour.”
Bankole said that the aim of the airline was to connect all the West African states before expanding its tentacles to Europe and America.
According to him, the airline will also commence Lagos-Dubai route in April, which has been in pipeline for over two years while the Baltimore, Washington DC in United States will starts soon.
“We are increasing our financial capacity in the area of growth. We are discussing with partners to acquire more aircrafts that we bring back home to be able to increase our capacity because we still have in our plans in the future apart from Dubai, we are doing Johannesburg and United States. Before now, we have to go to Benin Republic to travel to USA.
You can see the suffering, before the end of the year, we will start airlifting passengers to US,” he said.
He declared that aim of the Medview Airline is to improve performance on domestic, regional and stablilise international operations, including enhancing the services of passengers going to either Saudi Arabia or Jerusalem.
He said: “We are airline that is designated by the Federal Government of Nigeria in Saudi Arabia and Israel. Be an international airline, is making everybody in Diaspora seeing us and become patriotic, seeing an airline coming from their country and people speaking their own languages.Even mere seeing people coming down during the Hajj, they go and interact with them. It’s not easy but we thank God. We are focus and ready to sell the company in a corporate world.”