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.

The 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 commercial 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.

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