Aftab Chaudhry’s SPAC to give investors pure play access to Pakistan’s solar boom

For Pakistan’s stock market, the solar boom has so far been everywhere and nowhere. It is visible on the roofs of textile mills, petrol pumps, shopping plazas, dairy farms, mosques, schools and upper-middle-class homes. It shows up in customs data, in shrinking grid demand, in the alarm of power-sector bureaucrats, and in the sudden popularity of lithium-ion batteries. Yet for investors at the Pakistan Stock Exchange, there has been no clean, simple way to buy into the trend. There are battery makers with solar-adjacent products, power companies adding renewable projects, and a nascent green energy modaraba. But there has not been a mainstream listed company whose principal business is importing solar equipment and installing solar systems for customers.

That may be about to change.

LSE SPAC-I Ltd, the special purpose acquisition company sponsored by the LSE group of companies, has approved the next step in its merger with Ningbo Green Light Energy Ltd, a Lahore-based solar energy solutions provider with Chinese supply-chain links. Under the scheme approved by the board of LSE SPAC-I, the shell company will be merged into Ningbo Green Light Energy, leaving Ningbo as the resultant listed entity. The transaction is still subject to the sanction of the Lahore High Court and the completion of applicable regulatory approvals. But if it goes through, Pakistan’s public equity market will have something it has lacked during one of the fastest energy shifts in the country’s history: a listed solar EPC and equipment-distribution business.

The board resolution, passed by circulation on June 3 and announced to the stock exchange on June 10, sets a share swap ratio of 1.5 ordinary shares of Ningbo Green Light Energy for every one ordinary share of LSE SPAC-I. Until the scheme is sanctioned, LSE SPAC-I will continue as a going concern, but in substance the company has already done what it was created to do: raise capital, invest in a target, and prepare to collapse itself into the operating business.

That makes this not merely another small-cap corporate action. It is a test case for an entirely new route to market in Pakistan.

A SPAC, or special purpose acquisition company, is an odd beast: a listed company with no real business, no factory, no customers and, in the purest form, no operating history. It is created to raise money from investors and then find — or, as in this case, already identify — an operating company to acquire or merge with. In the United States, SPACs became briefly fashionable during the cheap-money years, attracting technology firms, electric vehicle start-ups and assorted speculative businesses. Many later disappointed investors, which gave the structure a somewhat tarnished reputation. But the underlying logic remains straightforward. A SPAC can offer a faster path to the public market for a private company, while giving investors an early route into a business or sector that may otherwise remain inaccessible.

Pakistan’s version is more modest and more regulated. LSE SPAC-I was incorporated in March 2025 as what its own prospectus described as Pakistan’s first special purpose acquisition company under the public offering regulations. It was set up for a very specific purpose: to invest in Ningbo Green Light Energy and subsequently merge into it. The issue size was Rs250 million, consisting of 25 million ordinary shares of Rs10 each, with Rs230 million earmarked for the equity investment in Ningbo and the remaining Rs20 million for issue-related expenses. The first phase gave the SPAC a 19.04% stake in the target company. The second phase is the merger now moving to the courts.

In other words, this is less a blank-cheque company than a pre-arranged public listing mechanism. Investors were not being asked to trust a sponsor to go hunting for an unknown target. They were being asked to back a known business in a known sector with a known transaction structure. That may make the Pakistani version less glamorous than Wall Street’s SPAC mania, but perhaps also less reckless.

The operating business at the heart of the transaction is Ningbo Green Light Energy. Despite the Chinese-sounding name, the company is incorporated in Pakistan. It was set up in April 2018 and converted into a public limited company in December 2024. Its registered office is in Gulberg, Lahore, with a branch office near Giga Mall in Islamabad. Its principal business is not solar-panel manufacturing, but solar system integration: importing panels, inverters and batteries, designing systems, installing them at customer sites, commissioning them, and providing operations and maintenance services.

That matters. Pakistan’s solar boom has not been led by domestic module manufacturers. It has been led by importers, distributors and EPC contractors who have taken advantage of the collapse in global panel prices, especially from China, and the sharp rise in Pakistani grid electricity tariffs. Ningbo Green Light Energy sits squarely in that part of the value chain. It sources solar panels, inverters, battery storage systems and other components from international manufacturers, while using local mounting structures and electrical components where feasible. Its work spans grid-tied, off-grid and hybrid systems for residential, commercial, industrial and agricultural customers.

According to its prospectus, Ningbo Green Light Energy has completed solar projects with aggregate installed capacity exceeding 300MW since 2018, including work for government entities, private industrial customers and military establishments. Its named customers include motorway rest-area infrastructure, a World Bank-supported Sindh solar project, textile mills, universities and private businesses. The company also had about 11MW under construction at the start of 2026. Historically, most of its work has been done on an EPC basis, though it has also experimented with deferred-payment structures for small and medium-sized enterprises and with solar-plus-storage solutions.

Its financial record is promising but uneven. Revenue rose to Rs2.11 billion in the year ended June 2024, with profit after tax of Rs326.6 million and a profit margin of more than 15%. In the following financial year, revenue declined to Rs1.71 billion and profit after tax fell to Rs192.0 million. In the first half of the 2026 financial year, revenue was Rs543.8 million and profit after tax just Rs27.1 million. Gross margins, which had been 27.6% in 2024, narrowed to about 20% in 2025 and remained close to that level in the first half of 2026. The prospectus attributed the pressure to import costs, currency weakness, competitive pricing and higher installation overheads.

Those figures are a useful reminder that the solar boom is not the same as an easy-money machine. Solar equipment prices have fallen globally, but local installers are squeezed between customers demanding ever-cheaper systems and suppliers, freight costs, currency movements and tax changes that can alter project economics quickly. A business such as Ningbo Green Light Energy is not a utility earning regulated returns. It is a contractor and distributor in a fragmented market, competing on price, execution quality, after-sales service and access to equipment.

Yet that is precisely what makes it a useful barometer of the real Pakistani solar economy. Utility-scale renewable projects attract headlines, development-finance money and government attention. But Pakistan’s current solar revolution has been more democratic, more chaotic and more decentralised. It has been driven by households, factories, schools, shops and farmers trying to escape an increasingly expensive and unreliable grid. It has not waited for the state to build transmission lines or auction generation capacity. It has arrived in containers at Karachi port and been installed, one roof and one factory shed at a time.

The economic logic is powerful. Pakistan’s electricity tariffs rose sharply after the rupee devaluation, the energy-price shock following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the accumulation of capacity payments owed to power producers. For many customers, especially those with daytime consumption, solar offers a hedge against both the tariff and the grid. Net metering improved the economics further by allowing surplus power to be exported to the grid, though the government has periodically signalled discomfort with the fiscal and distributional consequences. In a country where policy is often a greater risk than technology, investors should assume that the rules of the solar game will continue to be contested.

Still, the scale of adoption has become difficult to ignore. By March 2025, Pakistan’s installed electricity generation capacity stood at about 46,605MW, and the official data already included 2,813MW from net metering. Renewable capacity rose sharply as a share of installed capacity, while electricity consumption declined partly because of elevated tariffs and off-grid solar solutions. Independent research and trade data point to an even larger story: solar panel imports from China surged from a few gigawatts in 2022 to well over 16GW in 2024, with another large wave of imports in 2025. Even allowing for inventory, informal installation and under-recorded systems, the message is unmistakable. Pakistanis are building an energy system around the grid, not merely within it.

This is where the public-market significance of the LSE SPAC-I transaction becomes apparent. A listed Ningbo Green Light Energy would not be the largest company on the exchange, nor necessarily the most technologically advanced energy business in the country. But it would give investors a relatively direct exposure to the nuts and bolts of solarisation: panels, inverters, batteries, system design, installation, commissioning and maintenance. That is different from buying a utility with some renewable projects, a cement manufacturer installing captive solar for its own use, or a battery maker selling products that may or may not be used with solar systems.

The SPAC also reflects the continuing reinvention of the old Lahore Stock Exchange ecosystem. Aftab Ahmad Chaudhry, the central figure behind the LSE group’s recent evolution, has spent much of his career in Pakistan’s capital markets. He is a former managing director of the Islamabad and Lahore stock exchanges and later helped mobilise a group of investors that took control of LSE Financial Services Ltd, the successor entity left behind after Pakistan’s stock exchanges were integrated into the Pakistan Stock Exchange in 2016. The LSE group that has emerged since then is part financial holding company, part capital-market laboratory and part attempt to recycle the institutional legacy of a regional stock exchange into new listed products.

The group’s restructuring has been intricate. After the exchange integration, the residual Lahore Stock Exchange company became an NBFC under the name LSE Financial Services. In 2022 and 2023, a group of investors led and mobilised by Chaudhry acquired control and began breaking the old structure into more focused entities. LSE Ventures became the vehicle for liquid assets and legacy stakes in capital-market infrastructure such as PACRA, NCCPL, CDC and PMEX. LSE PropTech took on the property assets. LSE Capital later emerged as the parent or holding company after another scheme of arrangement that brought together LSE PropTech and Modaraba Al-Mali. Now LSE SPAC-I adds a new instrument to that experiment: a shell designed to take a growth company public.

There is an almost old-fashioned ambition here. Chaudhry and his associates appear less interested in simply trading listed shares than in manufacturing them. Their stated mission has been to expand the availability of listed companies and products in Pakistan’s capital markets. That is a worthy goal in a market where many of the most interesting businesses remain private, and where the exchange is still dominated by banks, fertiliser companies, cement manufacturers, energy businesses and legacy industrial groups. A successful SPAC merger into a solar company would not transform the market overnight. But it would widen the menu.

Ningbo Green Light Energy will not be entirely alone in the listed renewable-energy universe. Burj Clean Energy Modaraba is already listed on the GEM Board and offers exposure to green-energy project development and financing, with operational wind and solar assets and a pipeline that includes hybrid projects. K-Electric, though fundamentally a power utility rather than a solar company, has been pursuing renewable projects, including solar and hybrid wind-solar capacity. Reon Energy, associated with Engro, has long been a significant player in commercial and industrial solar and battery-backed energy systems, though it is not available to investors as a clean standalone listed exposure.

Then there are the battery manufacturers. Treet Battery has moved aggressively to present itself as part of the coming storage economy, including through partnerships with Chinese battery-technology companies to explore residential, commercial and industrial energy-storage systems. Exide Pakistan, a listed battery manufacturer, describes its business as including batteries, chemicals, acid and solar energy solutions. Atlas Battery, maker of the AGS brand, sells energy-storage batteries used in UPS, solar and genset applications. All three could benefit from a world in which rooftop solar increasingly needs batteries to smooth supply, reduce reliance on net metering and provide backup power during outages.

But those companies are not pure plays on solar installation. They are battery businesses with solar exposure. Burj Clean Energy is a green-energy investment and project-finance vehicle. K-Electric is a regulated utility with renewable ambitions. Reon is part of a broader private-sector energy ecosystem. Ningbo Green Light Energy, if the scheme is completed, would occupy a different niche: a listed company whose core business is the distribution and installation of solar power systems for customers across Pakistan.

That does not make it risk-free. The company operates in a fragmented market with hundreds of importers and installers. Pricing pressure is intense. Working-capital needs can rise quickly when projects scale. The business is exposed to the rupee, Chinese supply chains, shipping costs, tax policy, and the possibility that the government revises net-metering economics in ways that slow demand. Its recent margin compression suggests that growth in the sector does not automatically translate into expanding profits. Investors will also have to examine the governance of the post-merger entity, related-party supply arrangements, and the extent to which the new listed company can maintain transparency in a fast-moving import-driven business.

Yet the timing is difficult to dismiss. Pakistan’s power sector is undergoing a structural break. The old model — centralised generation, long-term power-purchase agreements, imported fuel, high capacity payments and captive consumers — is being challenged by a decentralised model built on cheap Chinese panels, private capital and customer desperation. That transition will create winners and losers. Grid companies may suffer if high-paying customers defect. Fossil-fuel generators may run at lower utilisation. Battery makers may find new markets. EPC contractors may scale up rapidly. Regulators may spend years trying to catch up.

For public-market investors, the question is not whether Pakistan’s solar boom is real. The panels on rooftops have already answered that. The question is whether a listed solar EPC and distribution company can turn that boom into durable earnings, disciplined cash flows and a governance structure credible enough for minority shareholders.

LSE SPAC-I is offering investors a way to find out. Its merger with Ningbo Green Light Energy is still pending, still subject to court and regulatory approvals, and still dependent on execution. But if it succeeds, it will mark a small but meaningful innovation in Pakistan’s capital markets: the first serious attempt to turn the country’s rooftop solar rush into a mainstream listed equity story.

For a market often accused of being trapped in the past, that alone is worth watching.