PROFIT_260504

11 Inside JAK Delivery’s plan to take Pakistani eCommerce sellers global

16 The ever-shrinking footprint of Standard Chartered Bank

24 Zia Chishti’s Ten Billion Dollar IT Export Playbook Habib Ullah Khan

22 Government decides to put underperforming state financial bodies on trial

26 Murree Brewery’s long pour goes global

31 We can almost solve freelancer payments in Pakistan. All we need is one ambitious CEO

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Inside JAK Delivery’s plan to take Pakistani eCommerce sellers global

To understand JAK’s eCommerce playbook, it is important to first look at what the company is already doing in markets where it operates and how that foundation is being built before extending into merchant-led cross-border trade

By Taimoor Hassan

In Pakistan, small businesses don’t sell globally in the true sense. What usually happens is much simpler: people either buy products in bulk locally or from abroad and then resell them or some sellers produce their own goods. Even when exports happen, they are often done through big marketplaces and not directly by the brand itself. Even big brands such as Gul Ahmed in textiles rely on marketplaces to boost their retail sales globally.

If a seller does want to sell internation-

ally, they usually have two choices. The first option is to go on a marketplace like Amazon. This gives you massive reach. You can access customers worldwide, but it comes at a cost. You have to pay commissions, spend money on ads to get visibility, and you don’t really own your customers. The platform controls everything.

The second option is to sell directly through your own website. This gives you full control, but now all the problems are yours. You have to generate orders, handle international shipping, deal with customs, manage delivery timelines, and figure out payments.

This can get expensive and complicated very quickly. On top of that, there’s another big issue: marketing. Getting international customers to even find your product is hard and doing it sustainably requires a lot of money. Most small sellers either simply don’t have the knowledge or budget to do this properly.

This is where JAK Delivery, built on the logistics network of Riyadh-based multinational logistics and delivery company SMSA Express, introduces a third option.

Instead of forcing yourself into a marketplace or making you handle everything yourself, JAK lets you stay local while selling

globally. Instead of choosing between marketplaces, with their commissions and dependence or going fully independent with all the operational headaches, there is an attempt to restructure the process itself.

JAK Delivery is essentially trying to separate what a merchant needs to do from what they are currently forced to do. In most cases, a seller in Pakistan is handling too many layers at once - production, pricing, marketing, payments, shipping, customs and delivery. The complexity doesn’t come from any one step, but from having to manage all of them together, often without scale or expertise. What JAK is doing is pulling some of those layers out of the merchant’s hands and centralising them - particularly logistics and demand generation so the seller can operate more like a local business, even while selling internationally.

Generating demand for SMEs

To understand JAK’s eCommerce playbook, it is important to first look at what the company is already doing in markets where it operates and how that foundation is being built before extending into merchant-led cross-border trade.

Before models like JAK began rethinking cross-border commerce from the perspective of sellers, one of the earliest and most effective attempts to unlock global eCommerce for emerging markets came from a consumer-first approach. Few services captured this shift more clearly than the Shop and Ship model developed by Aramex - an Emirati multinational logistics and delivery company.

At its core, Shop and Ship was not designed to help sellers expand internationally; it was built to solve a very specific and widespread problem for buyers. The problem itself was simple, but deeply frustrating for consumers in emerging markets. A customer sitting in Dubai, Karachi, or Riyadh could browse global platforms such as Amazon, explore international brands, compare products, and add items to their cart only to reach checkout and encounter a familiar limitation: the retailer or platform simply did not ship to their country.

This created a unique segment of consumers - people who were already comfortable with global eCommerce behavior. They tracked international sales events such as Black Friday, followed global brands, compared prices across regions, and were willing to purchase from international markets. Yet despite this willingness and awareness, they were constrained by a basic logistical barrier: access. The inability to receive deliveries in their home country effectively disconnected them from global eCommerce, even though

demand clearly existed.

Shop and Ship stepped into this gap not by changing how global eCommerce platforms operated, but by building a workaround around those restrictions. It did not attempt to convince retailers to expand their shipping zones or redesign their logistics; instead, it inserted itself into the process as an intermediary layer. The model worked by giving users something very powerful: a presence in multiple countries without physically being there.

When a customer signed up for the service, they were assigned multiple international shipping addresses, typically in key retail hubs such as the United States, the United Kingdom, China, and the UAE. These were not virtual addresses but actual warehouse locations operated by Aramex.

From that point onward, the purchasing flow changed. Instead of entering their home address at checkout, customers would ship their purchases to one of these assigned addresses. The retailer would complete what appeared to be a standard domestic delivery say within the United States without any visibility into the package’s final destination.

Once the shipment arrived at the warehouse, the system transitioned into its second phase. Aramex would receive the package, scan and log it into the customer’s account, and then forward it internationally to the customer’s home country. In effect, the company positioned itself between the retailer and the end consumer, converting what would otherwise have been a non-deliverable order into a completed transaction.

As an Aramex user explained the experience to this reporter, he could buy from multiple eCommerce platforms in the US on different dates, get them all delivered to his address - essentially an Aramex location in the US. Once all his orders were consolidated there, he could have them shipped first to Dubai and then to Pakistan to save on Pakistani taxes.

Customers using the service typically paid a membership fee along with shipping charges, making the model both accessible and commercially viable.

What made the model particularly compelling was not just the access it provided, but the scale at which it operated. Over time, Shop and Ship expanded its network across dozens of countries, enabling users to shop from a wide range of global merchants while consolidating deliveries into a single, coordinated logistics flow. For the first time, geography became less of a limiting factor in online shopping for these users.

At JAK Delivery, this same underlying logic is now being adapted and extended. Mehreen Feroze, who is leading JAK’s Pakistan operations, played a central role in build-

ing the Shop and Ship business during her time at Aramex, where she served as Global eCommerce and Digital Marketing Manager. At JAK, the intention is not to reinvent the model entirely, but to replicate and evolve it using the logistics infrastructure of SMSA.

The principle remains consistent: wherever SMSA has operational presence, customers can shop within those regions and have their orders delivered across borders through SMSA’s logistics network. This effectively recreates the same access layer that Shop and Ship provided.

Importantly, this model does more than solve a logistics constraint. It actively builds a base of customers. By enabling international shopping, JAK is gradually aggregating a segment of users who are already comfortable engaging in cross-border transactions. These are not first-time buyers experimenting with global eCommerce ; they are often repeat users who track international sales cycles, follow global brands, and actively seek opportunities to purchase from overseas markets when access is made easier.

Over time, repeated usage of the service reinforces behavior. Customers become familiar with the process, develop trust in the platform handling their deliveries, and build a level of comfort that reduces friction in future transactions. This repeated interaction gradually creates loyalty—not necessarily to individual brands, but to the platform that enables access itself.

That said, replicating this model in Pakistan may not be straightforward. A Pakistani logistics expert, who has served as a board member of a local logistics company, points out that the domestic base of consumers actively engaged in international online shopping is still relatively small. Without a sufficiently large pool of such users, scaling a consumer-first model of this kind could take time, particularly in a market where price sensitivity and local alternatives play a significant role.

Even so, the structural advantage of the model remains. Because all transactions are routed through JAK and SMSA’s network, the company gains visibility into purchasing behavior, preferences, frequency of transactions, and geographic demand patterns. This data is is tied to identifiable users who are interacting directly with the platform.

More importantly, this allows JAK to build direct relationships with its customers. Instead of remaining anonymous buyers on third-party platforms, these users become part of JAK’s own ecosystem and are reachable. Over time, this transforms a logistics solution into something more strategic: a demand layer that can be activated and connected to supply when needed.

We

do the marketing for sellers and we also do the paid media. We work with the biggest influencers in Saudi for customer acquisition. We are working more on expanding the customer base for our sellers

Mehreen Feroze, director at JAK Delivery

Enabling sellers to go global

JAK’s above model gives it a strategic advantage: it already has a customer base that are familiar with international shopping and willing to buy. They understand the process, they are familiar with the service provider that can get them their delivery orders. Their only limitation is the set of countries they can access through SMSA’s logistics network.

The platform can redirect this demand towards new sellers such as in the Pakistani market. In that sense it is JAK’s consumer model that enables its merchant model. By creating this customer base, JAK creates the demand layer that can later be matched with supply from new markets like Pakistan.

As more merchants are onboarded, the variety and availability of products increases, making the platform more attractive to existing customers. In turn, a larger and more active customer base makes the platform more valuable for new sellers looking to reach international buyers. This creates a loop where demand attracts supply and supply further enhances demand.

This is precisely the direction JAK is now moving toward. Having built a base of cross-border shoppers, the next step is to open that demand to new supply, starting with markets like Pakistan. State Bank of Pakistan’s data shows there were 9,584 registered eCommerce merchants as of June 2025. This number increased from 7,816 registered merchants in 2024. This is a growing trend of Pakistani merchants selling online but not necessarily going global that JAK can potentially work with. These are the merchants that likely have their own website, a prerequisite to work with JAK Delivery. Following State Bank’s directive last year to provide digital payments solutions to eCommerce merchants, more merchants are likely to have solutions that enable them to accept digital payments, the second prerequisite to work with JAK. Mehreen tells us that their is no COD in their model to ease the path to global selling by reducing cash

flow issues.

Once these prerequisites are fulfilled, the idea is straightforward: customers who are already using JAK platform across regions such as the GCC, Africa, Turkey, North America and Europe can now be introduced to sellers operating out of Pakistan. Potentially, JAK Delivery can open to sellers in 230 countries where its parent company SMSA has a logistical presence but its immediate plan is to open the network to sellers in Pakistan.

In practice, JAK introduces new sellers through direct outreach to these customers. Instead of asking merchants to spend heavily on customer acquisition, JAK positions itself as the initial demand driver. When a new seller comes on board, the platform communicates this to its existing users often through direct email introducing them to the merchant, their product, and their website.

“We do the marketing for sellers and we also do the paid media. We work with the biggest influencers in Saudi for customer acquisition. We are working more on expanding the customer base for our sellers,” says Mehreen Feroze, director at JAK Delivery.

The transaction itself does not happen on a marketplace controlled by JAK or another third party. Customers are directed to the seller’s own website, where the purchase is completed. In that sense, the platform acts less as a storefront and more as a connector between demand and supply.

Logistics, similarly, is structured to remain flexible. While the system is built on the infrastructure of SMSA, using it is not positioned as a requirement. Merchants can choose their own logistics providers if they prefer. That said, according to Mehreen Feroze, the expectation is that many will opt into the network organically.

“We don’t want to be imposers, but when merchants use SMSA as their delivery partners, the process tends to work smoothly, and the pricing is competitive compared to other options.”

The platform has been kept free as far as customer acquisition is concerned for Pakistani sellers, with the company only planning to make

money on shipping to customers. Mehreen, however, hinted that it might not stay free indefinitely.

A model in progress

While the model is promising, eCommerce and logistics experts believe it is still early and like most cross-border eCommerce solutions, its success will depend on how well it performs at scale. One of the key areas to watch will be demand generation. Simplifying logistics is an important step, but building sustained international demand for relatively unknown Pakistani brands will take time. Initial traction through platform-driven promotion can help, but long-term growth will likely depend on a brand’s ability to satisfy customers and provide a consistently superior customer experience. Sellers would see the greatest benefit if they could convert initial platform-driven demand into repeat purchases. Another defining feature of the model is its reliance on prepaid transactions. All orders are completed online before fulfilment begins, removing the need for cash-on-delivery. For merchants, this means immediate payment and reduced risk. For the platform, it simplifies cross-border operations that would otherwise be complicated by collections and returns. Prepaid orders also align with broader global and regional trends. In the MENA region that JAK plans to unlock for Pakistani sellers immediately, digital payments are steadily overtaking cash, with Saudi Arabian shoppers using cards for a significant majority of online purchases in 2024 according to Yahoo Finance. Some estimates place COD as low as around 9% of total eCommerce transactions in MENA region.

JAK operates within this expectation. Orders placed through its network are prepaid, and customers using the service are aware of this structure. In that sense, the model builds on an existing behavioural shift rather than attempting to force a new one, but it remains to be seen how consistently this will work in JAK’s case as it scales to new markets. n

The bank that has the oldest operating history in the country is also one that has been reducing its presence in the country. It’s not on its way out, but what exactly is SCB doing in Pakistan?

By Farooq Tirmizi

In some ways, it is as though the last two decades never happened. It has been almost exactly 20 years since Standard Chartered Bank Pakistan became the first major foreign bank to acquire a local bank, an acquisition that transformed the bank in the eyes of Pakistani consumers from being a niche foreign bank serving only high networth individuals and corporate clients to a more approachably aspirational brand.

Since 2008, however, the bank’s local and global management have been consistently treating that acquisition as a mistake, and have managed to successfully reverse it completely.

For the past five years, Standard Chartered Bank has had fewer physical branches in Pakistan than it did before the 2006 acquisition of Union Bank, currently sitting on just 37 branches as opposed to the 43 it had at the end of 2005. And its share of the banking industry’s deposits is now just 1.7%, which is far lower than the 3.1% of deposits it had before the acquisition and far lower than the 5.2% share it had immediately after acquiring Union Bank.

In other words, Standard Chartered Bank matters less to the Pakistani banking industry – and by extension, its economy – than it did 20 years ago. And the Pakistan business matters less to Standard Chartered’s global revenues than it has at any point in the past 20 years (barring the unusual year in 2013).

Put all of these data points together, and one might be forgiven for feeling that one is about to read yet another story of a multination corporation watching its Pakistan business slowly withering away before eventually pulling out.

And while the retrenchment story is real, and one that we will be digging into in this article, there is more to this story.

For one thing, Standard Chartered has a deep history in what is now Pakistan, and its operations here are among the oldest it has anywhere in the world. For it to leave Pakistan is no ordinary decision, and many indicators seem to suggest the bank is likely to hang around Pakistan for the foreseeable future.

So if it is not likely to be leaving any time soon, why is it shrinking its operations?

To understand that, we would need to understand the business strategy of the bank, and how it has had to shift in the face of trends in the Pakistani economy. But before we dive into all of that, first, a look into why Standard Chartered is unlike any other multinational that operates in Pakistan.

A history of Standard Chartered

Like many of the world’s most interesting stories about financial institutions, Standard Chartered is the brainchild of a Scottish entrepreneur.

James Wilson was the son of a wealthy textile mill owner in Scotland but had no interest in working with his father’s business. In 1824, at age 19, he moved to London to start his own business, engaging mostly in international trade. In response to British protectionist trade policies of the era, in 1843, Wilson launched The Economist, a newspaper dedicated to promoting free trade and economic liberalism.

In 1853, he sought – and received – a royal charter to create his own bank, which he named the Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China. The bank began operations in 1858, opening branches in Shanghai, Bombay, and Calcutta that year. The next year, it opened branches in Hong Kong and Singapore. And in 1863, it opened a branch in Karachi, making Standard Chartered (its successor entity) the oldest financial institution in the country.

The bank got its current name after the 1969 merger with the Standard Bank of British South Africa, a bank founded by another Scotsman, John Paterson. While both banks were founded in London, both did not have any retail presence in the United Kingdom, focusing their businesses almost exclusively on financing trade in the British Empire and its broader sphere of economic influence. Even today, the bank derives more than 90% of its profits from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

In more than a century and a half of its presence in what is now Pakistan, the bank has grown both organically and through acquisitions. In 2000, it acquired the India and Pakistan operations of ANZ Grindlays Bank, which was then the second oldest financial institution in Pakistan, having established its first branch in Karachi in 1883. (Grindlays opened a branch in Lahore in 1924 and Peshawar in 1926).

The big acquisition – and one that truly transformed Standard Chartered from being a foreign bank to the country’s only “local foreign” bank – came in August 2006, when it bought Union Bank for a transaction ultimately worth $511 million, still the largest acquisition of a bank in Pakistani history.

Union Bank had been founded in 1991 and its largest shareholder was the Saudi national Abdullah Mohammad Abdullah Basodan, a director and shareholder of Al Murjan Holdings. Al Murjan is the family business of the Khalid Bin Mahfouz, the Saudi financier

who was one of the founders of Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).

At the time of the acquisition, Standard Chartered had 43 branches in Pakistan and Union Bank had 65 branches. The combined entity became the sixth largest bank in the country and gave Standard Chartered the ability to say that it was truly a global bank with a nationwide local branch network.

The (brief) expansion drive

The logic behind the acquisition was sound: buy a local bank and bring it up to global standards, becoming the only global brand with a local branch network in the process. HSBC may brag about being “the world’s local bank” in its advertising slogans, but Standard Chartered actually put its money where its mouth is, at least as far as the Pakistani market is concerned.

The Union Bank acquisition was not StanChart buying the local operations of another foreign bank. Union Bank was as local as local banks get in Pakistan. Its CEO at the time of the acquisition was Shaukat Tarin (who then owned 5% of the bank), the legendary head of Citibank Pakistan in its heyday in the early 1990s when Citibank practically invented consumer banking as it is known today in the country. Tarin later served as federal finance minister.

It would have been tempting to simply buy Union Bank’s branch network and declare victory. But that is not what Standard Chartered’s management did. Badar Kazmi, its CEO at the time, decided to use the platform offered by the acquisition to further expand the bank’s presence in Pakistan. Standard Chartered went from 108 branches at the time of the transaction in August 2006 to 174 branches by June 2008. In retrospect, the timing may not have been ideal.

The expansion, needless to say, did not come cheap. Even after consolidating the impact of the merger, Standard Chartered’s op-

Born in 1805, James Wilson was a Scottish businessman, economist, and Liberal politician who founded The Economist weekly and the Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China, which merged with Standard Bank in 1969 to form Standard Chartered. He was also the first man to serve as finance minister of India, being appointed to the Viceroy’s Council in 1860 after the War of Independence of 1857. He presented India’s first budget. The last ever budget of United India would be presented by Liaquat Ali Khan in February 1947 when he was Finance Minister of the Interim Coalition Government formed by the Muslim League and Congress leading up to partition.

erating costs jumped by almost 137% to Rs12.2 billion in 2007, causing the combined entity to suffer a 50% drop in profit margins that year. Then came the financial crisis of 2008, and with it an attendant sharp rise in non-performing loans, causing net income to plummet by nearly 75% in 2008. Profits were now down to just Rs723 million ($10.3 million), a far cry

from just two years earlier when, in 2006, profits had hit a then-record amount of Rs5,698 million ($94.6 million).

That sharp decline in profits was enough to scare off Standard Chartered’s management, and the bank began almost immediately scaling back its expansion. The bank closed 12 branches in 2009, 19 in 2011, 13

in 2012. It has kept closing branches almost every year since 2008 (except 2010 and 2014) and, by 2021, was down to just 41 branches. That is fewer branches than it had even before it bought Union Bank.

All of this came during a context of turmoil at the bank at the global level. While its principal markets of India, China, and Southeast Asia were largely unscathed by the 2008 crisis, these economies did face a slowdown in 2013, and that began to have an impact on Standard Chartered’s financial health. Revenues slid 1.5% that year, but profits dropped by a dramatic 16.3%, wiping out almost all of the previous four years’ gains.

By 2015, the bank’s management could not continue to ignore the losses. The CEO was ousted in February and Bill Winters, a British-American banker who for years ran JPMorgan’s London operations and had once been talked about as a possible successor to Jamie Dimon at the helm of the world’s largest bank, was brought in as the new CEO.

Winters immediately showed himself to be a Dimon protégé: ruthlessly cutting costs and overheads wherever possible, and building what Dimon often describes as a “fortress balance sheet”. To do that, Winters announced in

November 2015 that the bank would be laying off about 15,000 employees (or about 18% of its global workforce) over the next three years.

While this approach helped reduce both operating costs and losses from bad loans, it did so at the expense of revenues, which have continued to decline faster than the drop in costs, resulting in the bank swinging to a net loss of $2,194 million in 2015 and a smaller loss of $247 million in 2016.

Ditching the branch for the app

At the Pakistan level, what Standard Chartered Bank’s management figured out after the 2008 financial crisis was that no matter how many branches they had, it would always be less than the biggest local banks, and its main corporate clients – and nearly all of its most profitable retail clients – were not drawn to the bank owing to its sizeable branch network.

For example, a multinational corporation might need branches across Pakistan to be able to make payments to suppliers and employees, and for that, they may turn to Habib Bank or United Bank for deposits and

payments. But for core bank deposits, that multinational might still want to use Standard Chartered, owing to its global parent company’s policies on risk management, with a global bank being seen as less risky than even a large local bank.

And then there is the fact that nearly every Pakistani who can be described as high net-worth likely has at least one account at Standard Chartered. It may not be their main bank account, or the one with the highest deposits. But it is unlikely that a person who is rich in Pakistan has no relationship with the bank whatsoever. And given the highly concentrated nature of wealth in Pakistan, that means that this profitable segment of retail deposits can be served with a relatively narrow geographic footprint of deposits.

Then there is the segment of customers that the bank describes as “emerging affluent”, what in other markets might be described as HENRYs: high-earner, not rich yet. For those customers, Standard Chartered offers its mobile app and web app.

These apps were once an industry-leading advantage, since the bank offered them long before all other banks in Pakistan, but given the advancements in fintech adoption

across the country, including by Pakistani banks, this advantage has eroded somewhat. Nonetheless, its digital infrastructure does allow the bank to capture a sizeable market share in another of Pakistan’s most attractive retail banking market segments.

So if the bank can serve multinational corporations, high net-worth individuals, and HENRYs with barely any physical branch network, why would it maintain a network as extensive as it once had?

Profits, not market share

“For us as an international bank, bigger does not mean better,”

said Rehan Shaikh, CEO of Standard Chartered Bank, in an interview with Profit. “Our global criteria is return-driven. We are a return-conscious bank. If we have reduced our balance sheet, we have supported that through digitization on the retail banking side.”

“Most of our services are app-based, whether they be on the retail side, or the corporate side. We offer the customer speed-to-

market that way. We have a niche business. We work with the government, multinationals, and large corporate clients.”

Shaikh does have a point. Standard Chartered is consistently one of the most profitable banks in Pakistan in terms of several key metrics. In particular, return on equity tends to be among the highest earned by any bank in the country. For the calendar year ending December 31, 2025, the bank’s return on equity – measured in US dollars –was about 24.2%, significantly higher than the industry average.

And that smaller branch network is a key part of the story: for the calendar year 2025, the bank’s efficiency ratio (operating costs divided by total revenue), was about 29.6% which is well below even some of the largest banks in Pakistan, which tend to have efficiency ratios north of 45% even in good years. And the deposits per branch for the bank were about Rs17,109 million per branch as of the end of 2025, about 8.6 times higher than the industry average of Rs1,986 million per branch, according to Profit’s analysis of data from the State Bank of Pakistan.

Declining deposits, higher dividends

The biggest cause of concern: deposits are declining in absolute terms, going from a peak of Rs836 billion at the end of 2024 to just Rs644 billion as of March 31, 2026, a decline of about 23%. During that same time, the bank paid out enough in dividends to reduce its equity value by Rs13.5 billion, meaning that the bank paid out more in dividends during the past 15 months than it earned in net income.

That pattern – the clear reduction in balance sheet size and taking out dividends in that aggressive a fashion – would normally cause some concern about the possibility of a pull out from the Pakistani market. However, the numbers warrant a closer look.

For one thing, the bank’s core clientele for deposits are no longer corporate entities, but instead individuals, and on that size, it has not seen any decline at all. Deposits from individuals are up by 4.7% during that same period, from Rs268 billion to Rs281 billion.

The decline in deposits came almost entirely through a reduction in corporate client

For us, as an international bank, bigger does not mean better. Our global criteria is return-driven. We are a returnconscious bank. If we have reduced our balance sheet, we have supported that through digitization on the retail banking side. Most of our services are app-based, whether they be on the retail side, or the corporate side. We offer the customer speedto-market that way. We have a niche business. We work with the government, multinationals, and large corporate clients

Rehan Shaikh, CEO of Standard Chartered Bank

We are very comfortable that we will continue to grow globally, and in Pakistan even as interest rates come off… We are building our underlying infrastructure to support a complete digital operation. We will be converting our core banking system from an older system to our state-of-the-art in Pakistan, which will allow us to continue to invest in everything technology and operations-related off of our state-of-the-art platform, which is state-of-the-art in the industry

Bill Winters, CEO of Standard Chartered Global

deposits and some financial institution deposits, which is at least partially explainable by the fact that many of the bank’s multinational corporate clients have been exiting the Pakistani market, and the Pakistani buyers of those assets likely continued their banking relationships with local banks.

So does the exit of a core part of its deposit base mean that Standard Chartered might decide to wrap up in Pakistan too? Maybe, but the global management appears to be giving some indications that they are likely to stay.

View from London

The most direct signal from the bank’s leadership in London is not words but actions: Bill Winters, the global CEO, has visited Pakistan several times, most recently in July 2024 when he is quoted as saying: “We see a greater potential in Pakistan and will continue to invest more as per the opportunity.”

He was quoted in Business Recorder as having said: “We are very comfortable that

we will continue to grow globally, and in Pakistan even as interest rates come off… We are building our underlying infrastructure to support a complete digital operation. We will be converting our core banking system from an older system to our state-of-the-art in Pakistan, which will allow us to continue to invest in everything technology and operations-related off of our state-of-the-art platform, which is state-of-the-art in the industry.”

He also indicated that the bank might start using Pakistan as an off-shore operations center for its global operations, pointing out that Pakistan has “all the operational, data analytics, data centres, and core skills that already exist in Pakistan. Accordingly, Standard Chartered is looking at these kinds of investments and that, of course, would mean hiring more people, filling up more space, and generating currency for the country.”

Then again, Winters has already had to scale back the level of ambition they have had for Pakistan. On his trip to the country in March 2017, he announced a target of seeking

to double profits to more than $200 million over the next few years. It has been about nine years since that statement and while the bank came close in 2024, it has not been able to actually achieve that target set by the global CEO.

Nonetheless, it does seem that the strategy of focusing the Pakistan business on just its most profitable units has resulted in at least some dividends: Pakistan now routinely accounts for more than twice the share of Standard Chartered’s global profits as it does of the bank’s global revenues. In other words, if the bank left Pakistan, it’s profit margins would decline.

But still, just because we are reasonably confident that the bank is not leaving Pakistan is not in itself an endorsement of its strategy while it is here. For that, the bank will need to figure out if it is willing to undertake the kind of risks that a market like Pakistan requires. The bank once showed that capability, before completely reversing course.

Another course reversal may not be a bad idea. n

Government decides to put underperforming state financial bodies on trial

Sluggish administrative machinery has forced policymakers to finally question the institutional scaffolding it built to manage crises now long past. Will they be able to see it through

The federal government has launched one of its most ambitious restructurings of financial institutions in recent memory. At the centre of this effort is the Cabinet Committee on Rightsizing, which has instructed the Finance Division to reassess and potentially wind up several state-linked financial bodies that were born out of past policy imperatives but are now redundant or underperforming.

At the center of this are seven Joint Investment Companies (JICs) but this initiative also targets several other underperforming financial institutions. The operation itself reflects an uneasy truth of Pakistan’s public finances, where, after decades of chronic deficiencies in revenue generation and institutional inefficiency, policymakers have stopped gunning for their growth and instead are scrambling for a lighter, more responsive state capable of delivering services without perpetually borrowing to survive.

Pakistan’s economy, which was once teetering under spiralling inflation and weak reserves, has only recently shown signs of stabilisation, thanks in part to tighter monetary policy and a renewed focus on public financial management reforms.

Sources told Profit that successive governments had established these Joint Investment Companies including Pakistan Domestic Sukuk Company Limited (PDSCL), Pakistan Mortgage Refinance Company Limited (PMRC), Pakistan Infrastructure Finance Company Limited (PIFCL), Pakistan Energy

(PISC), Pakistan Development Fund Limited (PDFL), and Pakistan SME Finance Company. The committee has now raised concerns over their continued relevance and performance.

Why were the companies established?

But it is important to understand the history of these Joint Investment Companies (JICs). These companies now under the government’s microscope were not created arbitrarily. Each arose from a specific moment in Pakistan’s fiscal history; moments when urgent financing gaps, or market failures pushed policymakers toward state-sponsored vehicles. Over time, however, these entities, much like most government run companies in Pakistan, accumulated overlapping functions, inconsistent governance interventions, and weak performance, prompting the current reassessment drive.

Let us take the Pakistan Domestic Sukuk Company Limited (PDSCL) for example. Formed around 2013–14, PDSCL was created to facilitate domestic sovereign Sukuk issuances. Its core role was administrative. To act as a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) for the government’s Islamic bond operations, helping Pakistan tap into Shariah-compliant liquidity at home.

But as the size of Sukuk issuances grew, especially after 2018 when Islamic financing became a key tool for budget support, PDSCL’s relevance increased, but so did concerns over

whether a standalone SPV was necessary once the market matured and the Ministry of Finance began developing internal capabilities.

Though effective for crisis financing at the point, critics argued that their continued standalone existence, with full boards, staff, and recurring administrative costs may no longer make financial sense to run.

Companies like the Pakistan Energy Sukuk Company Limited (PESCO) and Pakistan International Sukuk Company Limited (PISC) originate from similar, momentary crises, to pay off circular power sector debts and raising liquidity.

What makes these entities redundant?

All these companies share DNA i.e, they were created to fill market gaps at moments when the state needed specialised financing structures. Sukuk SPVs helped Pakistan raise liquidity without relying solely on conventional debt markets. PMRC sought to fix the chronic housing finance shortage. PIFCL aimed to bridge infrastructure financing gaps. SME-focused vehicles attempted to plug longstanding credit access issues.

But over time, several structural shifts have changed the playing field. Pakistan’s Islamic finance market has long since become deep enough that SPVs may not need to operate as standalone companies.

Banks have developed internal capabilities that overlap with PMRC’s refinancing functions. Infrastructure financing has been dominated by bilateral arrangements (like CPEC), reducing the role of domestic entities such as PIFCL.

And SME support has moved toward credit guarantee schemes and digital lending platforms, weakening the rationale for PSFC. Another major problem is that multiple such entities ended up addressing variations of the same problem, public finance constraint. This creates duplication and conflict at a very grassroot level.

Another question pertinent to ask here is why was this not nipped in the bud. Sadly the answer to that is what holds true for most redundant government operated companies and bodies. Boards and staff members possess political capital shielding them from losing lucrative positions, which is until the financial crunch becomes too real, and fixing the issue becomes just significant enough. And the IranUS war proves to be one of those catalysts.

As a senior official told Profit, the new rightsizing drive intends to determine which institutions still serve a strategic purpose and which have become artefacts of previous policy cycles.

Why Rightsize Now?

Pakistan has recently looked to embark upon a sweeping rightsizing programme that extends far beyond piecemeal tweaks. Earlier efforts encompassed the merger, abolition, or consolidation of over 82 federal departments into 40 entities in the first phase of reforms approved by the federal cabinet. As per the official version, these changes were designed to improve governance efficiency, and sharpen focus on core functions.

Additionally, the government outlined plans to rationalise 43 ministries and 400 departments in a phased rightsizing drive, driven by the need to ease fiscal pressures and eliminate redundancies that have weighed on public finances.

The need for these steps was always there but when Pakistan’s fiscal deficit for FY24 hit a high of 7.7% of GDP, and the primary budget deficit hit Rs 718 billion, things became hard to just kick down the road.

What are the changes proposed?

The Finance Division has been tasked with not just reviewing mandates, but also defining clear performance criteria and conditions so that these companies either realign with core public objectives or face closure after a one-year review. If an entity is found to have strayed from its intended purpose, the committee has flagged wind-up as an option. A bold stance in a bureaucratic system known for protecting institutions irrespective of performance.

And it is not all that rotten. State financ-

ing vehicles such as JICs have played practical roles in expanding Islamic finance. In 2025, Pakistan raised a record Rs2 trillion through Sukuk issuances, the highest annual figure since these Islamic bonds were introduced in 2008. But they are not the only entities capable of raising these funds.

Similarly, government auctions of hybrid Sukuk (combining fixed and floating returns) have attracted strong investor appetite, underscoring both the challenges and opportunities embedded in state-led financial innovation.

Sources pointed out to Profit that Pakistan’s mutual fund sector has grown dramatically, suggesting private markets may adapt more dynamically than state instruments, a phenomenon visible in the industry’s nearly sevenfold growth to Rs3.93 trillion over six years, driven in part by Shariah-compliant products.

Privatisation and the Future of SOEs

The rightsizing extends beyond financial vehicles to larger state-owned enterprises (SOEs). The government is also moving forward with the privatisation of Zarai Taraqiati Bank Limited (ZTBL), one of the country’s key agricultural lenders, which is undergoing restructuring to maximise investor value ahead of sale.

ZTBL’s eventual privatisation reflects lessons from Pakistan’s past. These issues are also noted in strategic reform proposals by the State Bank which advocates private sector participation to enhance scale and competitiveness.

Similarly, the Cabinet Committee on Privatisation has endorsed moves to proceed with the sale of House Building Finance Company (HBFC), reaffirming that the state intends to shrink its footprint in non-strategic sectors.

“Digital” Transformation

Adefining feature of the rightsizing agenda is its emphasis on digital transformation. The Controller General of Accounts has been ordered to present a roadmap for end-to-end digitisation.

According to sources, this includes automation, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, which aims at cutting human resource and operational costs by as much as 30–40%. Digital systems are also expected to reconfigure the Federal Treasury Office and integrate it with the central bank’s systems.

However, most of Pakistan’s digital reforms face multiple execution challenges. Beyond the chronic shortage of spectrum and periodic nationwide internet disruptions, the

larger hurdle is the transition of an analogue, paper-driven bureaucracy toward a digitally native ecosystem. This shift requires not only new systems but a substantial investment in training, change management, and institutional restructuring. Ironically, the very capital needed to build this digital foundation is the same capital the government is trying to conserve under its rightsizing and fiscal consolidation agenda.

Moreover, projects such as the Digital Economy Enhancement Programme in the past have seen slow disbursement and limited operational use, underscoring the complexity of implementing digital systems in a sprawling bureaucracy.

Regulators and Competition

Similarly, the Auditor General of Pakistan has been directed to devolve provincial functions, while the Central Directorate of National Savings has been tasked with undertaking a full scale digital transformation to increase its contribution to government borrowing to 10–15% within the next two to three years.

Further restructuring measures include revamping Pakistan Mint, Lahore, allowing private sector participation in non-core minting functions, and considering the merger of the National Security Printing Company with other entities. The Financial Monitoring Unit will continue operating in a lean structure, with a focus on automation and efficiency through advanced technologies. Regulatory bodies are also under review.

The Competition Commission of Pakistan is set to be strengthened to better tackle anti-competitive practices, particularly in sectors dominated by state-owned enterprises. Meanwhile, the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan will undergo a comprehensive assessment aimed at enhancing its effectiveness, transparency, and role in facilitating business growth.

As part of the broader reform agenda, the government is considering divesting its stake in National Investment Trust Limited through institutional investors or a public offering, while EXIM Bank, still in its early stages, will be reviewed after one year.

The Finance Division itself is not exempt from the overhaul. It has been directed to undertake comprehensive digitalisation, improve capacity, and significantly enhance efficiency. The committee has recommended reducing the staff-to-officer ratio from 4:1 to 2.5:1, alongside measures to attract top-tier professionals. A detailed transformation plan is expected within 90 days, marking what officials describe as a decisive shift towards a leaner, technology-driven financial governance framework. n

OPINION

Habib Ullah Khan

Zia Chishti’s Ten Billion Dollar IT Export Playbook

Prologue

In my opinion, Pakistan has had three true business titans who broke free of the rentseeking fortune path. Agha Hasan Abidi, who built a global bank. Malik Riaz, who built entire cities. And Zia Chishti, who built billion dollar companies. All three tore up the playbooks and built their own. All three were forces of nature that bent the world to their will. All three are controversial in their own ways.

Chapter 1

I was seated at a table at the Serena. The last of the breakfast crowd was filtering out when I spotted a familiar fae sitting alone, calmly drinking coffee and having jalebi. Then it hit me. It was Zia Chishti. The bold frame glasses had thrown me off. I went and introduced myself. We had attended the same school, although he was a prodigal genius and graduated young and before me. He asked me to sit and we had a chat. Before leaving I asked him a question I had been researching myself.

What would it take to get the next 10 billion dollars of IT exports? Zia leaned in and started speaking. What follows is an explanation of his basic 3 principles.

Build Products, Not Body Shops

Pakistan’s tech talent pool is simply too small to replicate the Indian services model. India produces roughly 1.5 million engineering graduates a year and still struggles with quality. Pakistan produces a fraction of that, with sharper quality constraints. A TCS or Infosys style outsourcing empire is not a race we can compete in based on volume, especially as margins compress every year as global clients move work to agentic AI. The alternative is the Estonian playbook, which rewards product depth over labour arbitrage. Estonia, population 1.3 million, built Skype, Wise, Bolt and Pipedrive. Digital services account for roughly 7 percent of its GDP and per capita tech exports exceed USD 4,000, placing it ahead of several G7 nations on a density basis. Ireland took a parallel route by positioning itself as the European headquarters for global software firms, pulling foreign direct investment from 3 percent of GDP in the 1980s to more than 15 percent today and anchoring over USD 200 billion in annual services exports. Finland did it with a different flavour, riding Supercell, Rovio and a deep games industry to become the largest per capita mobile gaming exporter in Europe. In all three, the win came from owning the product, the brand and the intellectual property, rather than renting out engineers by the hour.

The P in Pakistan needs to stand for product

TThe author runs a digital content agency and also advises Profit on content related to technology.

he effect is twofold. Product companies generate up to 10 times the revenue per engineer that services firms do, and every founder who exits one spawns two or three more, and senior management of product companies that successfully exit end up making their own companies or investing in them. It is a compounding ecosystem. Policy still treats these as afterthoughts rather than as the core of the export strategy. If we back 50 to 100 product companies with serious growth capital, give them an ecosystem that encourages bringing money back home, then we let volume build on value, instead of the other way around. There are some ancillary targeted interventions related to this that the government can help with, like building risk capital pools, creating and attracting the best product talent and lowering the cost of vibe coding for developers.

Declaring a Computer Science Education emergency

The talent shortage is throttling Pakistani IT exports acceleration. Pakistan graduates roughly 25,000 computer science students a year, of whom perhaps 5,000 meet international hiring bars. To credibly support a product economy we need to reach one million

quality graduates over the next decade. That requires rewiring the entire engineering value chain including K-12, not just expanding higher education.

China’s response to the AI economy is the most instructive case study available. In 2017 Beijing issued the New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan, and followed it in 2018 with a mandate to introduce AI and computational thinking into the national K-12 curriculum. In 2024 the Ministry of Education went further, directing every primary and secondary school to deliver at least eight hours of AI-specific instruction per year, with Beijing’s own municipal schools moving to weekly AI classes from grade one. The state publishes its own AI textbooks, trains tens of thousands of teachers annually, and treats computational fluency as a matter of national security rather than an elective career choice. University enrolment in AI-related majors has tripled since 2019. A generation of Chinese students is being formed around the assumption that they will build with AI, and the downstream effect on patent filings, high quality published research and deep-tech exports is already visible.

The principle matters here. Sure Pakistan does not have Chinese budgets but the Chinese insight is that when the economic value creation goal posts move, curriculum has to move with it, urgently, at the level of the whole nation, and without waiting for consensus. We are decades behind on basic numeracy, let alone AI. This is an argument for declaring an emergency. I mean if Beijing felt the need to reform K-12 while already leading in several AI domains, a country with our starting position cannot afford a lighter response.

The good thing is that with AI all countries start at GO. Pakistan needs to anchor mathematics, statistics and computational logic in every curriculum from grade one. These three disciplines create skilled computer engineering talent. You can also change the way education is done to do basic numeracy and literacy at early grades and these disciplines later, using no teachers. Just tablets and a coordinator. Such micro schools can be launched in 8 to 10 weeks. Introduce structured AI literacy from grade six, using open-source curricula and models hosted domestically to balance cost and sovereignty.

Vietnam has already made mathematics, statistics and logic the core of its K-12 reform since 2018 and now exports more than USD 150 billion a year in software and electronics. Singapore’s Code for Fun, mandatory for every upper primary student since 2014, tripled the digital economy’s contribution to GDP between 2017 and 2022. The templates exist. We need to have a mindshift where we treat education as infrastructure, funded on the same horizon as roads and energy.

Seamless movement of Capital and People

Economies are embedded in ecosystems. The fuel for meeting Pakistan’s export ambitions will come from institutional reforms.

Vietnam’s Doi Moi reforms, begun in 1986, dismantled licensing regimes, opened foreign capital flows, and treated commercial disputes as a matter of economic survival. Vietnam knew that the number one criteria for investment and exports was trust and certainty, and the best way to get that was open movement of capital and the confidence that commercial contracts would be enforced. The export economy grew from USD 2 billion in 1990 to over USD 370 billion in 2023. Poland’s Balcerowicz Plan in 1990 eliminated most trade restrictions and currency controls inside eighteen months, and exports tripled within a decade, turning Poland into the anchor of European manufacturing supply chains. Georgia under Mikheil Saakashvili stripped 84 percent of business licences between 2004 and 2010. Foreign direct investment rose from 2 percent to nearly 20 percent of GDP, and Georgia leapt from 112th to 8th in the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business index.

On courts, the Dubai International Financial Centre Courts offer the most actionable model. Established in 2004 with English common law procedure and English language judgments, they resolve commercial disputes in an average of twelve months. That single reform unlocked billions of dollars in contracts and anchored Dubai as the region’s commercial arbitration hub and gave investors the confidence to base themselves there in droves.

Pakistan needs to establish commer-

cial courts with a fixed 180-day disposition target and professional judges paid at global benchmarks. Eliminate trade licensing for any export-facing business. Permit free movement of money, engineers and founders across the border. Investment, value creation, and talent follow trust and certainty and that can come quickly with just a few painful reforms.

Chapter 2

Zia has left but I am still sitting at his table, a little in disbelief. His playbook for getting the next 10 billion dollars is top of my mind. Complicated scenarios often require elegant solutions and elegant solutions are usually simple. Three steps to change Pakistan’s tech exports trajectory. Three steps to kickstart Pakistan economy’s fightback. Three steps to taking our destiny into our own hands.

Epilogue

Ten billion dollars is roughly half of what Vietnam added in a single year of its post-reform decade, and less than a fifth of what Estonia’s digital economy earns on a per capita equivalent basis. We just need to back products over bodies, to educate for the economy we want rather than the one we had, and to remove the institutional friction that has kept our entrepreneurs small and starved. We have a bright young population. Zia’s playbook is proven. The ambition has always been there. The only question is whether we start in this coming fiscal year, or go attend another presentation at Serena by a consultant on how to grow tech exports in 5 years. n

The views of the writer do not represent the views of the publication.

Murree Brewery’s long pour goes global

After surviving prohibition, export restrictions and Pakistan’s narrow formal alcohol market, 165-year-old Murree Brewery is looking overseas for the next stage of growth.

On April 29, 2026, Murree Brewery ran the kind of newspaper advertisement that would once have seemed almost implausible in Pakistan: a call for distributors to help export its brews.

For most companies, a distributor search is a routine commercial notice. For Murree, Pakistan’s oldest and largest brewery, it reads more like the opening of a locked door. The company has made beer, spirits and malt beverages through war, partition, prohibition, regulatory suspicion and social discomfort. It has continued to operate in a country where alcohol is barred for the Muslim majority, permitted only through exceptions for non-Muslims and foreigners, and kept away from formal advertising. For nearly half a century, it could sell alcohol at home to a limited audience, but could not send it abroad.

That has now changed. After Pakistan’s export policy was amended last year to allow alcohol exports to countries outside the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, Murree has begun testing foreign markets. It has already sent beer shipments to the United Kingdom, Portugal and Japan, while looking at other destinations including the US and Canada. The company also has an advantage that did not exist in its earlier history: it has already been exporting non-alcoholic drinks to more than a dozen countries, giving it relationships with distributors who know the brand, the paperwork and the supply chain.

For a 165-year-old company that has spent much of its modern life learning how not to attract too much attention, the shift is significant. Murree has survived by keeping its head down, making space for itself in a constrained domestic market, and expanding into non-alcoholic products that could travel more easily through Pakistan’s mass consumer economy. Its results for 2024-25 show how well that strategy has worked. The company crossed $100 million in annual revenue for the first time, reported higher margins and increased profit, and continued to use its non-alcoholic business as both a hedge and a growth channel.

The question now is what happens when Murree is no longer confined to the market that taught it restraint. If beer and spirits are its highest-value products, and if exports finally give those products a route to larger legal markets, the company may be entering the most important commercial moment of its post-1977 history.

From Ghora Gali to Rawalpindi

Murree Brewery’s history begins in 1860, in the hills near Murree, where it was established at Ghora Gali to supply British civil and military personnel during colonial rule.

Like many industrial concerns founded during the Raj, it was built for a specific imperial economy. Unlike most, it survived the end of that economy, the violence of partition and the creation of a new state whose identity would make its core product politically sensitive.

The company’s operations later shifted largely to Rawalpindi, where its red-brick industrial presence became an iconic part of the city’s commercial landscape. The original hill property was eventually sold, while other assets were lost to history: the Quetta distillery was destroyed in the 1935 earthquake, and the Ghora Gali site was burned in 1947. The business endured, passing into the hands of the Bhandara family, Parsis whose minority status would become central to the company’s ability to remain in the trade after Pakistan’s creation.

Murree’s endurance has always depend-

exports of alcoholic products were effectively shut off. Before that, the company had sold abroad, including to India, Afghanistan, Gulf countries and the United States. After the ban, it became a brewery with a foreign history but no foreign future.

The company adapted by narrowing its posture and widening its portfolio. It continued to make beer and Pakistan-made foreign liquor, including spirits such as whisky, vodka, gin, rum and brandy. It also grew non-alcoholic lines including malt drinks, juices, carbonated soft drinks, bottled water and glass bottles. Over time, that combination turned Murree into something more complex than a brewery. It became a brewer-distiller, a soft-drinks maker and a packaging manufacturer.

Its formal structure reflects that dual identity. Murree organises itself into three

ed on operating inside a contradiction. Alcohol is legally available in Pakistan, but only within a narrow framework. Non-Muslims may purchase limited quantities through permits, foreigners may access it through authorised channels, and licensed outlets exist in specific markets. At the same time, alcohol is banned for the Muslim majority, cannot be advertised normally, and remains socially and politically sensitive. This left Murree with a formal market, but a small one; legal continuity, but little room for public assertion.

The defining rupture came in 1977, when prohibition was imposed under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and later tightened under Gen. Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. Murree was allowed to keep operating for permitted customers, but

divisions: Liquor, Tops Juices and Glass. The Liquor division includes both alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages, meaning the word “liquor” in the company’s accounts is not the same as alcohol alone. Tops covers juices, aerated soft drinks and mineral water. Glass bottles and jars serve both Murree’s own production and outside customers.

The arrangement helped Murree grow in a market where its most profitable products were legally constrained. Alcohol gave it pricing power and margins. Non-alcoholic beverages gave it reach, visibility and a wider consumer base. Glass gave it an industrial backbone. The company’s long survival came from balancing those three identities, not from relying on one.

How Murree built scale at home

Murree’s recent performance shows that the balancing act has not merely kept it alive, but allowed it to thrive. For the year ended June 30, 2025, Murree Brewery reported net revenue of Rs28.6 billion, up 20% from Rs23.8 billion a year earlier. Net profit rose 24.4% to Rs3.3 billion. In dollar terms, the top line translated to roughly $102 million, putting the company above $100 million in annual revenue for the first time in its history.

dealing with inflation, high borrowing costs and pressure on disposable income. Yet Murree managed to grow revenue, improve margins and maintain shareholder payouts. Part of that came from selective price increases. Part came from scale. Higher throughput reduced unit costs in brewing and bottling, while a richer product mix supported margins.

The company’s portfolio explains the result. Alcohol is not necessarily the largest business by units sold, but it remains the bigger revenue and profit ticket. About 55% of revenue in 2024 came from alcoholic bev-

The profit story was even more revealing than the sales number. Gross profit rose 31.3% to Rs7.4 billion, lifting the gross margin to 25.8% from 23.6%. Operating profit increased 32.6% to Rs4.5 billion, while the operating margin improved to 15.9% from 14.4%. Net margin edged up to 11.4% from 11%. Earnings per share rose to Rs117.9 from Rs94.8, and the full-year dividend reached Rs41.5 per share after interim payouts and a recommended final cash dividend.

erages, while Murree Beer itself accounted for 19.3% of revenue. Much of the alcoholic beverage revenue came from PMFL, the company’s spirits and hard liquor portfolio. By volume, however, non-alcoholic products play a much larger role, with distributors and company officials indicating that roughly half of beverage units sold are non-alcoholic.

That creates a useful split. Alcohol gives Murree high-value sales in a restricted mar-

Those numbers matter because they came during a period of cautious consumer spending. Pakistan’s households have been

ket. Non-alcoholic drinks allow the company to compete in normal retail channels, broaden

its customer base and reduce dependence on a politically sensitive category. The Tops portfolio, including juices, soft drinks and water, has therefore become more than an accessory business. It is a strategic hedge.

Murree’s own product development points in that direction. Its recent reports have highlighted new non-alcoholic launches, including Bigg Orange, while media coverage has noted its push into energy drinks, juices and malted beverages. Malt-79 and other malt products sit alongside carbonates and juices that can be sold to the mass market. These are lower-margin categories compared with beer and spirits, but they are larger, less restricted and more visible.

Geography also matters. Karachi has emerged as Murree’s most important domestic market, contributing roughly one-third of domestic revenue last year, more than all of Punjab combined. The city offers density, formal retail channels and a licensed outlet ecosystem that is difficult to replicate elsewhere. Murree’s domestic strategy has therefore rested heavily on winning Karachi, while layering on volume from the rest of Sindh and major urban centres in Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

But Pakistan still imposes clear limits. The formal alcohol market is small because the eligible consumer base is small. There are around 9 million non-Muslims in Pakistan, less than 4% of a population of about 250 million. Tourists, diplomats and foreigners add demand, but not enough to make the domestic legal alcohol market truly scalable. Murree can improve pricing, packaging and distribution, but it cannot change the size of the permitted market at home. This is why exports don’t just add another sales channel, they change the height of the ceiling Murree has been working under.

Export licence changes equation

For years, Murree’s export ambition had the shape of a family campaign. Isphanyar Bhandara, the company’s chief executive and member of the National Assembly, has said that his father and grandfather tried to secure permission to export but could not. In an earlier interview with AFP, he described the approval as “another happy milestone,” adding that earlier attempts failed.

The company had reason to feel the contradiction sharply. It could produce alcohol at home for licensed buyers, but could not export to countries where alcohol is legal, regulated and taxed. The argument against exports had less to do with production and more to do with perception. In an earlier interview with NPR, Bhandara said the theory behind the ban was that an Islamic country should not be seen

as exporting a vice.

The economic case has now won more space. Pakistan’s 2022 export policy change allowed alcohol exports to non-OIC countries, and the approvals that followed have reopened a path closed for nearly 50 years. Murree’s first test shipments have been modest, but the distributor advertisement suggests a more deliberate phase is beginning.

The advantage is not starting from zero. Murree has already been exporting alcohol-free products since 2020 to more than a dozen countries. That gives the company more than familiarity with export documentation. It gives it to existing buyers. In an earlier interview with NPR, export manager Ramiz Shah said the first distributors in the United Kingdom and Japan to buy Murree beer were already importing some of the company’s non-alcoholic products. “They are easy to target because they know us,” he said.

That relationship may be the hinge on which the next phase turns. For a brewery from Pakistan, entering foreign alcohol markets will not be straightforward. Beer shelves in Europe and North America are crowded. Craft brewers, legacy brands, global giants and regional specialists compete fiercely on price, taste, identity and distribution. Murree cannot simply arrive with age and expect shelf space. It will need importers willing to tell the story, place the product and build a consumer base.

But Murree does have a story. It is one of the oldest industrial companies in Pakistan, a colonial-era brewery that survived partition, prohibition and decades of regulatory caution. In foreign markets, especially those with South Asian diaspora populations, that history could become part of the brand. At home, Murree cannot advertise alcohol in any meaningful way. Abroad, it can use heritage as a commercial asset.

Exports also sharpen the importance of its highest-value products. Domestically, Murree’s alcohol lines are constrained by licences, taxes and the size of the permitted consumer base. Internationally, those products can enter markets where the category is normal, even if competition is intense. Beer and PMFL products may therefore move from being high-margin but domestically boxed-in categories to products with external growth potential.

That does not mean Murree should abandon the careful portfolio logic that got

it here. The non-alcoholic business remains central. It provides domestic scale, export relationships and insulation from regulatory risk. But exports alter the equation by allowing the alcoholic side of the company to pursue growth without depending solely on Pakistan’s limited formal market.

The company’s future strategy is therefore likely to rest on four linked moves.

First, it will have to widen its foreign distribution base, beginning with markets where South Asian consumers already know the Murree name or may be curious about it. The United Kingdom, Japan and Portugal are early tests, but North America and parts of Europe could offer larger diaspora-linked opportunities.

Second, it will need to preserve pricing power in alcohol while avoiding overreach. Murree has long operated with an instinct for caution. In an earlier interview with NPR, Bhandara said he was brought up with the idea of not expanding the brewery too visibly and not appearing to flex while producing liquor in an Islamic country. That restraint remains relevant at home, even if the company becomes more ambitious abroad.

Third, it must continue building non-alcoholic products. Export permission may make beer and spirits more exciting, but Tops and malt drinks remain the company’s mass-market face. They also open doors with overseas distributors who can later carry alcoholic lines where legally permitted.

Fourth, Murree must navigate taxes, levies and input costs. The company has already dealt with super tax, water-use charges and the cost pressures that come with packaging, energy, barley, resin and glass. Exports can bring dollar revenue, but they also bring compliance costs, logistics expenses and market-building risk.

Still, the timing is favourable. Murree enters this export phase with record revenue, stronger margins, a functioning domestic base and an established non-alcoholic export network. It is not a distressed company searching overseas for survival. It is a profitable company looking abroad because its domestic alcohol market has always been smaller than its production history.

That is what makes the newspaper advertisement notable. It is not merely a sales notice. It is a signal that Murree is ready to test whether a company shaped by constraint can now grow through the very product it had learned to keep quiet.

For 165 years, Murree Brewery has adapted to whatever Pakistan asked of it: colonial demand, post-Partition survival, prohibition, silence, diversification and scale. Its next challenge is different. It must learn how to be visible abroad while remaining careful at home. If it manages that balance, the export licence may not just add revenue. It may allow Murree to become, for the first time in half a century, the international brewery it once was and the one it was never quite allowed to be. n

We can almost solve freelancer payments in Pakistan.

All we need is one ambitious CEO

The SBP just cleared the last big regulatory hurdle. The offshore infrastructure exists. The corridor is proven. What is missing is not law or technology. It is willpower

LBy Faizan Siddiqi

et me start with a confession. I am not a global payments expert. I have not run a bank, built a payment gateway, or negotiated a Visa acquiring agreement. What I am is someone who has watched this particular problem sit unsolved for the better part of two decades, who spent some time recently trying to understand why, and who believes the honest answer is no longer “the regulation won’t allow it.” It is closer to “nobody has tried hard enough.”

This piece is an initial attempt to map a path leading to a solution. If someone who actually knows this space reads it and tells me three of my assumptions are wrong, I would consider that a win. The goal is to move the conversation from “this is complicated” to “here is a possible shape of a solution, let us stress test it.”

With that said:

Pakistan has approximately 2.4 to 4 million freelancers (including full time and part time), making it one of the largest freelance workforces in the world. In the first half of FY2025-26 (July–December 2025), Pakistani freelancers collectively earned a record $557 million in foreign exchange, a strong 58% increase compared to the same period last year. Full year earnings for FY2025-26 are on track to approach or exceed $1 billion.

The growing freelancer earnings have clearly been a point of pride for anyone involved. Ministers invoke these numbers at every digital economy summit. The SBP has issued circular after circular in their name. And yet, in 2026, a Pakistani freelancer who wants to send a payment link to a client in Austin still cannot do it. Not from a Pakistani entity. Not through Pakistani infrastructure. The closest thing available is a Payoneer account, which is an American company giving you a virtual US bank account so you can pretend, for the purposes of getting paid, that you do not live in Pakistan.

This is not just a minor inconvenience, it is a structural tax on every knowledge worker in the country. The details of how a Pakistani freelancer actually gets paid today is mapped in the infographic below:

The actual problem

Let us get one thing straight: the issue has never really been receiving money.

SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, is a secure, global messaging network used by financial institutions to send information and instructions for cross-border transactions. It does not transfer funds directly but acts as a trusted, standardized system for directing money transfers between banks worldwide.

It is available and works in Pakistan.

The Exporters’ Special Foreign Currency Account (ESFCA) facility introduced by the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) was designed for freelancers and IT exporters to receive, hold, and manage foreign currency. It allows freelancers to retain up to 50% of earnings in foreign currency. The SBP’s remittance channels have handled billions in inflows for years.

Receiving has never been the problem.

The problem is that foreign clients do not get the same easy payment experience they are used to elsewhere. In many countries, a freelancer or business can create a Stripe payment link in seconds. The client pays by card or bank transfer, the payment is processed smoothly, and the money reaches the seller without the client having to think about banking complications.

Pakistani freelancers cannot offer that same experience. This is because Pakistan does not have a locally recognised payment company that can act as a merchant of record for international card payments, hold foreign currency on behalf of users, and then settle the money into Pakistani bank accounts. Visa and Mastercard do not allow Pakistani payment companies to directly acquire international card payments in this way, while Pakistan’s foreign exchange rules also restrict companies from holding dollar balances for third parties. As a result, payments to Pakistani freelancers usually have to pass through a foreign company first. The real question is why Pakistan has never built its own system to do this.

What the SBP just changed and what’s missing

On April 6, 2026, the SBP issued two circulars, FECL6 and FECL7, that quietly resolved the single biggest operational bottleneck in this space.

They abolished Form R on a per transaction basis.

For context, Form R was the documentation freelancers had to submit for every single incoming foreign payment. Every invoice settled meant a separate form, manually filed, constantly causing delays and lost payments. The SBP has replaced all of that with a single declaration at account opening. From that point, incoming IT export receipts flow without per transaction paperwork.

The same reforms mandated one day processing for inward export receipts, standardized documentation requirements across all banks so

the rules are the same everywhere, raised the enhanced reporting threshold to $25,000, and allowed ESFCA debit cards for direct USD spending on international services.

The ESFCA framework already permits 50% retention of export proceeds in foreign currency, with a floor of $5,000 per month, and no SBP approval is required for business expenses paid from that balance.

The receiving pipe is now as clean as it has ever been in Pakistan’s history. The SBP has done its initial part. What remains is the sending side. The payment link. The merchant of record. The offshore entity that takes a foreign buyer’s card payment and routes it cleanly into a Pakistani freelancer’s ESFCA.All this, needs new laws. Till legislative changes happen we need innovative and legally compliant solutions that help us solve this for free lancers fast. The natural question is, what still remains to be done, and how is it being done across the border in India? Let’s first address that before we get into non-legislative solutions using existing optionality. The comparison can be seen in the infographic below:

The Saudi model and why it deserves a closer look

Now, there have been workarounds to this that many in the freelancing and IT exports space in Pakistan have been using to make payments easier for their clients. One model that has been common in fintech circles for some time goes roughly like this: You register a UAE free zone company, obtain a Stripe account, and use that entity as the front end for Pakistani freelancers. This works at a basic level. But I do not think it is the most strategic version of the idea for two reasons.

Firstly, Stripe is not the only rail. Airwallex, now incorporated in Saudi Arabia following Ministry of Investment approval in September 2025, offers multi currency accounts, global payment acceptance, and payment links that are in some ways better suited to a sub merchant model than Stripe. Checkout.com, Adyen, and Worldpay offer comparable products. The payment link function is a vendor choice that can be revisited. The entity structure and the jurisdiction are the strategic decisions that matter.

Second, Saudi Arabia has a claim to being a better jurisdiction than Dubai for this specific purpose, and I think this part of the argument is genuinely underappreciated.

Saudi Arabia sends more money to Pakistan than any other country on earth. In October 2025 alone, Saudi remittances to Pakistan reached $820 million. Over the first four months of FY2025 26, the Kingdom contributed $3.13 billion to Pakistan’s inflows. The corridor between Saudi Arabia and Pakistan is the single most liquid, most trusted, most SBP seasoned money pipe that exists.

When money arrives from Saudi Arabia, the entire Pakistani financial system is calibrated to receive it without friction. The correspondent banking relationships are fifty years deep, rooted in the Gulf labour migration corridor. The SBP’s purpose code infrastructure is fully mature for this flow. Pakistani banks have dedicated teams for processing Saudi inflows. A UAE free zone structure carries more scrutiny at the Pakistani end because such structures are sometimes associated with opaque corporate ownership arrangements. A Saudi entity with a genuine business presence does not carry that association in the same way.

A Saudi company registered as an IT services and digital payments entity can open accounts with Airwallex Saudi Arabia, hold USD at Al Rajhi Bank or Riyadh Bank, and accept global card payments without depending on a ‘Western Only’ domiciled processor at all. That is a meaningful degree of independence

from infrastructure that has historically been unavailable to Pakistani-linked businesses.

For all intents and purposes, Saudi Arabia is a more natural partner for Pakistani freelancers and IT companies to send payment links and to receive them as well because of how the financial relationship between Pakistan and the Kingdom is calibrated. The infographic below explains why Saudi Arabia has more of an edge:

Two ideas that could make the model stronger

While the infrastructure to use Saudi Arabia for this purpose exists, there are ways to make it stronger and

more efficient. I want to flag two structural additions that, to my non expert eye, seem worth exploring seriously. People with more ex perience in these areas will know better than I do whether they hol d up.

Settlement via a Standby Letter of Credit

The obvious approach to moving money from the Saudi company to Pakistani freelancers is a SWIFT transfer per payment received. This works mechanically, but it generates a high volume of small cro ss border transactions, each carrying its own processing overhead, FX conversion cost, and correspondent bank fee. At scale, that ove rhead becomes significant.

A Standby Letter of Credit may be a more elegant settlement mechanism. Under this structure, the Saudi entity establishes a n SBLC with a Pakistani bank, perhaps a facility sized at $5 mill ion as a starting point. The Pakistani bank, backed by the SBLC as col lateral, pre-credits freelancers’ ESFCAs as payments accumulate on the Saudi side. Rather than hundreds of individual SWIFT transfers each day, the Saudi company makes periodic bulk settlements against the SBLC, weekly or fortnightly, and the Pakistani bank draws down the balance to reconcile.

This collapses the transaction overhead dramatically. It gives a Pakistani bank a meaningful and profitable role in the product It converts a high frequency micro settlement problem into a cl ean treasury operation. The SBLC is a standard instrument that ever y Pakistani bank already understands, so the compliance path is w ell established rather than novel. Whether this structure survives contact with the actual regulatory and banking requirements on bot h sides is something I genuinely cannot say with certainty. But i t seems worth a serious conversation with the relevant parties.

The merchant of record problem

through

Visa and Mastercard’s own frameworks

The concern I would raise about any structure where the Saudi e ntity is the sole merchant of record is this: Pakistani freelancers w ould have no direct relationship with the card networks. They would be invisible to Visa and Mastercard. If the Saudi entity ever ran into problems, the payment history of thousands of Pakistani freelan cers would disappear with it.

This is a real concern. But it may have a direct answer from within the card networks’ own rulebooks.

Both Visa and Mastercard have formal Payment Facilitator programmes. A Payment Facilitator underwrites merchants and sig ns acceptance agreements on their behalf, holds the acquiring rela tionship, and settles to what are called sub merchants. The importa nt point is that sub merchants have formal registered status under the PayFac. They are not invisible. Stripe operates exactly this mo del.

Visa runs a CEMEA Payment Facilitator Certification Programme specifically designed for Middle East markets, with a tie red entry structure. New payment facilitators processing under $100 ,000 per month can enter through a Conditional Participation Agreeme nt, which is a lighter, faster route to certification. A Saudi acqui ring bank sponsors the PayFac. The Saudi entity registers as the cer tified PayFac under that sponsor. Pakistani freelancers register a s sub merchants, visible in Visa’s system, with formal agreements and their own transaction histories.

Mastercard has an equivalent structure. Sub merchants require direct registration with Mastercard once they exceed $1 million in annual volume, which gives the product a natural maturation pat h.

This is not a workaround. It is the mechanism that every major

global payment platform uses to operate at scale. The card netw orks have already solved this problem. The question is whether someo ne is willing to go through the process of becoming a certified Pay Fac in the Saudi context, and use that relationship to formally bring Pakistani freelancers inside the tent.

What the freelancer actually experiences

Sign up once. Verify identity using your CNIC and your ESFCA details. Ten minutes, done.

Get a payment link with your name on it. Send it to a client anywhere in the world. They pay by Visa or Mastercard. They see a clean checkout. They do not need to know or care about the structure behind it.

Within 48 hours the payment is in the Saudi company’s USD account. The Pakistani bank, backed by the SBLC facility, credits your ESFCA. The USD balance sits there, spendable directly via your ESFCA debit card for software subscriptions, cloud infrastructure, or any other international business expense. The PKR portion converts automatically and arrives the same day via Raast.

For domestic clients, the same dashboard generates a PKR payment link over Raast. One product, one account, both markets covered. It is explained in detail in the infographic below:

Who could build this?

There is no single right answer to this question, which is part of what makes it interesting. The opportunity is ripe for the taking. The structure supports several different entry points, and the ambition of the outcome does not depend on which one a builder chooses.

Take a look at the infographic below before reading the rest of the analysis:

A Pakistani bank with genuine digital ambitions can register a Saudi subsidiary or negotiate a joint venture with a Saudi banking partner. The Pakistani bank brings what it already has: millions of freelancers with ESFCA accounts, PKR settlement rails, and existing KYC infrastructure. The Saudi partner brings what the Pakistani bank cannot easily obtain from Karachi: a SAMA licence, a Visa acquiring relationship, and a USD pool account with a Saudi bank. Neither needs to own the other. The structure is a revenue sharing arrangement over a jointly operated corridor, not an acquisition.

A Pakistani telco has a different kind of edge. The mobile wallets already exist and carry tens of millions of users who trust them for everyday transactions. What those wallets have never had is an international payment link layer. A partnership with a Saudi telco affiliated fintech adds exactly that, without either side rebuilding what the other already has. Distribution is the Pakistani telco’s asset. Regulatory access to Visa and Mastercard acquiring is the Saudi partner’s. Put them together and the product exists.

A well funded startup, with founders from either country or both, is the lightest version of the structure. Register a Saudi entity, open Airwallex accounts, pursue Visa Payment Facilitator certification through a Saudi acquiring bank. The capital requirement at launch is modest relative to the market being addressed. What matters here is not the nationality of the founders but whether they are willing to spend the time in both cities that the structure requires.

Then there is the version that comes from the Saudi side entirely. Vision 2030 is deliberately growing Saudi Arabia’s own gig and digital services economy. A Saudi fintech founder who looks at Pakistan’s four million freelancers does not have to see a foreign market. They can see the natural extension of a corridor they already live in. Build the product in Riyadh, launch it in Karachi, and add Saudi freelancers onto the same infrastructure as the platform matures. The corridor already exists. The question is who claims it first.

The largest version of the idea is the one that a Saudi bank or telco with serious ambitions should be thinking about. An institution that decides to own the payment infrastructure for South Asian digital workers is not building a product feature. It is building a moat. Four million verified Pakistani freelancers, their payment histories, their international client relationships, and their recurring export volume are an asset base that compounds over time. Saudi freelancers, whose own gig economy Vision 2030 is actively trying to grow, are the natural next cohort on the same rails. The Pakistani corridor and the Saudi digital labour market are not two separate opportunities. They are one platform, seen from two ends of the same money pipe.

What is consistent across all five paths is this: the CEO who moves does not need a Pakistani passport. They need to understand the corridor, believe the market is real, and be willing to do the work in both cities. The corridor does not care where you are from. It cares whether you show up. n

The writer is a strategist focused on AI Transformation in emerging markets. He tweets/posts@faizansiddiqi and blogs at: blog.chinookstrategy.com

Right time to buy-the-dip in One Constitution Avenue apartments, say Islamabad real estate agents

By Profit

Real estate agents in Islamabad are urging potential buyers to quickly take advantage of the falling prices of One Constitution Avenue, a luxury apartment complex at an extremely exclusive location in Islamabad.

“Timing is the name of the game,” said Siddique Abbasi, of Abbasi Associated, showing potential buyers the building, while police were escorting current residents out of the building. “And the timing is now.”

“Yes, there are problems,” he said, while Shehzore vehicles were being loaded with the belongings of residents of the building after the Islamabad Police raided the building complex and forced the residents to vacate in a couple of hours, owing to the contested legality of the structure.

“But this is Pakistan, which locality doesn’t have a problem?”

“Some localities have a water problem, others don’t have natural gas piping, others have erratic electric loadshedding problems. This one has the police throwing you out? So what? Nothing you can’t deal with.”

“But it won’t remain the same,” said Abbasi. “These current residents and owners are just nervous and they will sell these units for a quarter of what they bought them for! They don’t know that the better ones amongst these belong to really important and powerful people. And those guys never let anything happen to their investments. This is Pakistan, people!”

“For instance, I have it on good authority that one of the better apartments here belongs to (former PM) Imran Khan. Can anyone hurt Imran Khan, tell me?”