It’s all about the economy, stupid (and a little about fascism)
Let us end the year with a bang, thought Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz (PML-N), over something that everyone can remember. Somehow, the...
How Pakistan’s Big Tobacco gets away with tax theft
They are called loosies in the United States. A single cigarette that is purchased and sold, usually in areas that are low-income...
Big Business and the saviour of the last resort
When was the last time you saw a conglomerate advertising not its consumer-facing or even industrial products but itself – its own...
For the stock market, the worst may be over, but the recovery is not here yet
After a brutal year of losses, the stock market looks ready for a recovery. Pakistani equities – as measured by the benchmark...
Project management: a job that is unlikely to be automated away
There is a lot of talk about the ‘jobs of the future.’ Nobody is quite sure what these jobs are, where you...
Gul Ahmed’s pivot towards retail hits a slowdown
For the past five years, Gul Ahmed’s management has been telling anyone who will listen the following: the company is shifting its...
Middle market banks continue aggressive expansion spree
Gone are the days when the middle market banks competed for the scraps from the Big Five banks’ table: they now aggressively...
Shaukat Yusufzai was (kind of) right. But the BRT is still a disaster.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet are of imagination all compact, the bard teaches us. The same can be said about...
Tania Aidrus’s big bet on creating a Digital Pakistan
It started, as things often do in Pakistan, with a WhatsApp forward. On Thursday, December 5, a group of Pakistanis living in...
Could locally produced cheese make a dent on Pakistan’s imports?
You hear it everywhere. We have too many imports and too few exports. How can a country be expected to progress when...
How to grow a Big Five bank: the case of ABL
Allied Bank is the type of institution that makes that “Lazy Big Five Banks” stereotype look true. The bank has been –...
The spectacular decline of Hubco
It is not every day one can characterize a company that made Rs11.9 billion in profits last year as struggling, but there...
Pakistan: The Economy of an Elitist State
In 1999, Dr Ishrat Hussain was nearing the end of a two decade career working for the World Bank. Already having made...
Large-scale industry continues to contract, agriculture shows promise
It comes as no surprise to any observer of the Pakistani economy that large-scale manufacturing continues to decline in output. For the...
Rising prices help Aisha Steel continue growth trajectory
In a macroeconomic environment where government spending on infrastructure is slowing down most businesses are scaling back their investments, one would expect...