When Ghani Chemworld Ltd (GCWL) listed on the Pakistan Stock Exchange in April 2025, it did so with a single-minded purpose: to build Pakistan’s first large-scale plant dedicated to manufacturing calcium carbide and its derivatives, and in the process turn one of the country’s more obscure import lines into an exportable surplus.
The company is a freshly minted public limited concern, incorporated in July 2024 as a wholly owned subsidiary of Ghani Chemical Industries Ltd (GCIL). Under a court-sanctioned demerger and merger scheme, GCIL’s in-progress calcium carbide project was carved out and transferred into Ghani Chemworld, with GCIL shareholders receiving shares in the new vehicle. In other words, what investors are buying on the stock market today is essentially a pure play on one project: a greenfield calcium carbide complex at the Hattar Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
According to a recent corporate briefing, the plant has a planned annual capacity of roughly 25,000 tonnes of calcium carbide, making it the first facility of this scale devoted to the product in Pakistan. The project enjoys a ten-year income tax exemption under the SEZ regime, a concession that applies to both domestic sales and exports and is central to the company’s profitability calculations. Management expects commercial production to begin in early December 2025 after commissioning and test runs under the supervision of Chinese and European technical advisers.
The factory relies on an electric arc furnace rather than coal gasification, making electricity its primary fuel. Ghani Chemworld estimates power demand at around 11-12 megawatts (MW) and is keen to benefit from any subsidised industrial tariff packages that the government may extend over the next few years. The decision to avoid coal gasification aligns with a broader shift in Pakistan’s industrial policy towards cleaner, grid-based energy for new projects, even as the company still depends on imported coke or semi-coke from China as a key raw material.
Raw materials are, in fact, where the company believes it can build a cost edge over the imported product it wants to displace. Limestone, one of the two main inputs, is procured locally from mine owners at an all-in cost of about Rs3,000 per tonne, including transport to Hattar. Ghani Chemworld does not mine the limestone itself and therefore avoids royalty payments, treating it as a straightforward procurement expense. The other major input, coke or semi-coke, is imported, typically from China, at around $325-350 a tonne for the required quality. Management says it is shunning cheaper Iranian material because higher sulphur content would compromise product quality and downstream customer processes.
The plant will not only produce calcium carbide. The process also yields lime (calcium oxide) and precipitated calcium carbonate (PCC), which Ghani Chemworld intends to market into industries ranging from paper and packaging to paints, plastics, food and pharmaceuticals. If utilisation on the main lines does not reach the targeted eighty percent in the second full year of operations, management plans a “Phase II” to add secondary products such as acetylene gas, hydrogen, magnesium oxide and carbon black, using finer calcium carbide fractions as feedstock. Additional capital expenditure for hydrogen and carbon black is estimated at roughly Rs1.2 billion, with another Rs500 million for magnesium oxide.
The ambition, however, is clearest in the market share numbers. Ghani Chemworld estimates Pakistan’s domestic calcium carbide consumption at around 12,000-15,000 tonnes a year, of which more than ninety 5% currently arrives as imports, largely from China. Ghani Group companies have been trading the product for about 15 years and currently handle around 40% of the local market through imports. With the new plant, management is targeting nothing less than ninety percent of domestic demand, along with exports to the Middle East, Central Asia, Eastern Europe and Turkey.
To reinforce that import-substitution thesis, Ghani Chemworld says it will lobby Islamabad to reset customs duty on imported calcium carbide. The duty had previously stood at 16% but was lowered to around 7-8% in recent years; management argues that reinstating the higher rate would support local industry and conserve foreign exchange, especially now that a domestic producer is emerging.
Calcium carbide sits at the heart of several industrial value chains. At the most basic level, it is used to generate acetylene gas when reacted with water. Ghani Chemworld’s briefing describes acetylene as the main intermediate, widely used for precise metal cutting and welding applications across manufacturing, construction and automotive repair.
Acetylene also serves as a building block for a range of downstream chemicals. One of the most important is polyvinyl chloride (PVC), the plastic used in pipes, cable insulation, flooring and countless other products. Industry reports and stock-exchange filings note that calcium carbide, often referred to as calcium acetylide, is an established route to acetylene for PVC production, especially in countries where coal and limestone are abundant. That gives the material strategic importance in emerging economies whose infrastructure booms are PVC-heavy.
Beyond acetylene, Ghani Chemworld’s process will spin out two co-products that feed quietly into many everyday items. Precipitated calcium carbonate, or PCC, is used as a filler and coating pigment in the paper industry, a stabiliser in plastics and rubber, and a key ingredient in paints and coatings to improve whiteness and gloss. It is also used as a supplement or stabiliser in certain food and pharmaceutical formulations. Lime or calcium oxide, another output, finds demand in leather tanning, sugar refining, and the paper and pulp industry, and in various environmental and water-treatment applications.
Globally, the calcium carbide market is projected to grow at a steady pace, with research firms forecasting mid-single-digit annual growth over the latter half of this decade, driven by chemical and metallurgy demand in Asia. Pakistan, despite being only a mid-sized industrial economy, ranks among the world’s larger importers of the compound: trade data suggest it brought in about $8 million worth of calcium carbide in 2023, making it one of the top dozen importers worldwide.
Those imports increasingly originate from a small cluster of suppliers. China alone accounts for roughly two-thirds of Pakistan’s calcium carbide imports, with Mexico and Slovakia providing much of the remainder. The result is a classic vulnerability: a critical industrial input, used across welding shops, fabrication yards, PVC production and various chemical plants, is largely dependent on a few foreign sources and on the country’s limited foreign-exchange reserves.
Ghani Chemworld’s project aims to change that equation by placing a sizeable chunk of capacity within Pakistan’s borders. With nameplate output higher than estimated domestic demand, the company envisions a base load of local customers supplemented by export contracts into neighbouring regions where there is either no local producer or where producers are operating at tight capacity. If the plan works, calcium carbide could move from being a pure import line for Pakistan to a minor but useful export earner.
Behind Ghani Chemworld stands one of Pakistan’s more quietly influential industrial families. Ghani Group of Industries traces its roots back more than half a century, with a reputation built primarily in glass. Based in Pakistan but with a presence in the United Arab Emirates, the group operates multiple glass plants, producing container glass, float glass, pharmaceutical glass and value-added products such as tempered and bent glass.
The group’s narrative has often centred on import substitution. Its glass businesses are credited with replacing a large portion of Pakistan’s mirror and speciality glass imports by investing early in domestic capability and introducing technologies like “spectrum” coated mirrors. Over time, Ghani entities have spread across the stock exchange: Ghani Glass, Ghani Global Glass, Ghani Global Holdings and various associated companies in industrial gases and allied sectors.
Ghani Chemical Industries, the parent from which Ghani Chemworld was spun out, itself grew out of the group’s diversification into industrial, medical and speciality gases. As that business gained scale, management identified calcium carbide as a natural adjacency: the compound is not only a raw material for acetylene gas but also interacts with several chemical value chains the group already serves.
For around 15 years, Ghani Group companies have been among Pakistan’s leading traders and importers of calcium carbide, handling roughly 40% of the domestic market. That trading background has given them an intimate view of price cycles, quality differentials and customer requirements. It has also laid bare the country’s dependence on imported supply, especially during periods of currency stress when dollar-denominated inputs become more expensive overnight.
The decision to build a domestic plant, and later to spin it into a separately listed company, fits within this broader pattern. In November 2024, shareholders of Ghani Chemical Industries approved a demerger that would transfer the calcium carbide project into Ghani Chemworld. The Lahore High Court subsequently sanctioned the scheme in February 2025, with formal confirmation in March, clearing the way for the project to be shifted wholesale – assets, liabilities, incentives and all – into the new subsidiary.
By April 2025, Ghani Chemworld was listed on the PSX as a separate entity, giving investors a direct line into the project. For the Ghani Group, this structure does several things at once: it ring-fences project risk, creates a specialised platform for future expansions in carbide and derivatives, and taps public equity to help fund the sizeable capital expenditure involved. Investors, in turn, get a focused bet on an import-substitution story backed by a group with a track record of building and operating heavy industrial plants.
As of the first quarter of financial year 2026, Ghani Chemworld remains in the pre-commercial stage, with no sales recorded from the calcium carbide plant.
The real story, therefore, lies in management’s projections for when the plant starts running. For the first seven months of commercial operations – effectively the remainder of FY26 after the December start-up – Ghani Chemworld is targeting production of 10,000-11,000 tonnes of calcium carbide, equivalent to utilisation in the low-to-mid forties as a percentage of nameplate capacity. By the second full year, the company hopes to ramp up to around 80% utilisation, which would put annual output close to 20,000 tonnes.
On the revenue side, management is guiding to between Rs3-4 billion in sales in that initial seven-month period, rising to roughly Rs8-9 billion in the following year once the plant is operating for twelve months at higher utilisation. Net profit margins, excluding the contribution from associates, are expected to be in the 6-7% range in the partial first year, before climbing towards 10% as scale benefits, tax exemptions and process optimisation kick in.
These numbers hinge on several moving pieces. Power costs are an obvious variable: with an electric arc furnace consuming more than ten megawatts, any volatility in industrial tariffs will feed quickly into unit costs. Ghani Chemworld hopes to benefit from discounted industrial power schemes, at least in the early years, though such incentives are always subject to fiscal pressures and policy change. Raw material prices, especially imported coke, are another risk factor, given their linkage to global commodity cycles and freight rates. A strengthening rupee would cushion those costs; a renewed bout of currency weakness would have the opposite effect.
Competition is, paradoxically, both limited and intense. On the one hand, there is no domestic competitor of similar scale; Ghani Chemworld’s plant will effectively define Pakistan’s local capacity. On the other hand, imported calcium carbide is a commoditised product with multiple overseas suppliers, so local producers must maintain quality and cost discipline to avoid being undercut despite tariffs. The company’s long history as an importer gives it a benchmark for landed costs and quality standards, which may help in calibrating pricing strategies.
Policy, too, will play a decisive role. Ghani Chemworld’s call to raise customs duty on imported calcium carbide back towards sixteen percent is justified, in management’s view, by the need to protect a nascent domestic industry and conserve foreign exchange. But regulators will have to weigh that request against downstream users’ concerns over input prices, particularly in welding, fabrication and PVC-related industries that are already grappling with energy and financing costs. A balance will need to be struck to ensure that one piece of the industrial ecosystem is not strengthened at the expense of another.
For investors, the appeal of Ghani Chemworld is straightforward: a newly listed company with a single, clearly defined project that addresses a tangible import bill. Pakistan imported about eight million dollars’ worth of calcium carbide in 2023; if Ghani Chemworld can replace most of that with domestic production and also carve out a niche in export markets, the earnings potential is obvious. The tax holiday, SEZ incentives and low-cost limestone supply add further upside to the economics, provided the company can manage execution risks and keep the project on schedule.
Yet it is equally clear that the business will be exposed to commodity cycles, energy policy and regulatory decisions on trade. In that sense, Ghani Chemworld is a microcosm of Pakistan’s broader industrial challenge: how to move from trading imported materials to making them at home, without simply shifting risk from the customs gate to the factory floor.
What is different here is that the sponsor group has walked this road before. Ghani’s glass businesses are now an integral part of Pakistan’s manufacturing landscape, and its gas operations have carved out their own space. If the same playbook of disciplined execution, technology partnerships and market development can be applied to calcium carbide, the company may yet turn a niche chemical into a small but symbolically important success story for local industrialisation.
