Abdul Razak Dawood: a Memon village, Columbia, and building DESCON

A village with no electricity, and a family that kept starting over

The conversation opens with Muzamil framing the guest carefully: the founder of DESCON, a man from the well-known Dawood family, with a long focus on exports and a particular interest in Africa. What follows is less a business interview than a memory of nearly the entire arc of Pakistani industry, told by someone who lived through it.

Abdul Razak Dawood begins at the beginning. He was born in a very small village in Kathiawar, in what is today Gujarat, India. No electricity, no running water, nothing. The village was a hub of the Memon community, and it ran on a particular rhythm: the men were almost always away trading, so the village itself was made up of older people and children.

The family’s story before partition is not one of uninterrupted success. His grandfather went bankrupt in the crash of 1929 and never recovered before he died. His sons, Abdul Razak’s father and uncles, were left looking for work anywhere in India, mostly in sales. Under the eldest brother, they regrouped, went to Mumbai, and started a cotton-yarn business. From there they built outward: a ginning factory near the village, a ghee factory in Calcutta, a slow climb into industry. Then partition arrived, and everything had to move.

The family packed up for Karachi. His father stayed back a year, through 1948, to sell off the family’s assets in India, a few shops and the Calcutta ghee facility, while Abdul Razak got his first formal schooling in Calcutta. By the end of 1948 they were in Karachi, with no business base there at all. “We had to start from scratch,” he says. They traded the house they had given up in India for a house in Karachi and began again.

The pivotal early decision belonged to his uncle, who told the family: you stay in Pakistan, I am off to London. He saw a new country being born and went to Manchester to supply textiles into a Pakistan starved of yarn and cloth. Soon after, the elders made a second decision that would shape Abdul Razak’s life. Eight of the family’s boys were sent to England. Five of them stayed on at a single rugged English public school out in Yorkshire.

The bus, the flash, and a switch that never flipped back

Abdul Razak is candid that he was not, at first, a student. He was a sportsman, rugby and cricket and anything with a ball, and he paid no attention to academics at all. The result was that he failed his O-levels and had to repeat them. It did not bother him in the slightest. He was a sportsman.

Then came one of the strangest and most specific stories in the conversation. He was on a bus coming home from school, his cousin beside him, when he looked out the window and saw what he describes as a flash, like lightning, on a clear evening at Maghrib time. His cousin saw nothing and told him he was dreaming. Abdul Razak turned to him and said: from now on I am going to work, I am going to study, I am going to start my life differently. “And that was it.” He dates it to September 1961, when he was about seventeen. The switch flipped from sports to academics and, by his account, never flipped back.

He passed his O-levels and A-levels, went to university, and studied mining engineering at Newcastle. The choice of mining was almost an accident of policy. In those days the State Bank had to approve remitting money abroad, and it would only fund study in fields not already available inside Pakistan, such as metallurgy, mining, and chemical engineering. Mechanical or civil, both available at home, would not be funded. So he did mining. He had no idea at the time how useful an engineering grounding would later prove. It is a theme he returns to throughout: that things are stored up in a life and only make sense in retrospect.

Columbia, and learning what hard work actually was

The transformation he keeps coming back to is America. He went to Columbia University in New York for his MBA, and he says plainly that it changed his life. It was the late 1960s, and New York was raw. Harlem was far rougher than today, the Vietnam War was on, students were in the streets. He was on campus for the famous Columbia strike of 1968. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy had been assassinated. The civil rights movement was unfolding on television. “The 50s America was peaceful,” he says. “The 60s America was volatile.”

There were almost no Pakistanis around him. He was one of a tiny first wave: a cousin at Harvard, another at Northwestern, others starting to reach Berkeley. But the thing that marked him most was not the politics. It was the work. “I never realized what hard work was until I went to America,” he says, and not even England had prepared him for it.

He tells it through one image. At registration the university handed him a sealed envelope marked “do not open until you have registered.” He took it back to his room, threw it on the bed, assumed it was American propaganda, and finally opened it: it was the assignment for the first day of class. He skimmed it, walked in, and watched the professor pull a card from a deck, call a name, and launch straight into the business issues of a real company. It shook him. When he asked the librarian what time the library closed, she told him it never did. Open all night, come whenever you want. At midnight people were out jogging. “It’s a different world,” he says. “It’s always awake.” And the surprising part of his telling is that he loved it. Being active, being busy all the time: that, he decided, was the life he wanted.

Coming home to a country turning against the 22 families

While the boys were away, the family business in Pakistan had grown into something large. His uncle, whom he describes as relentlessly aggressive and able to “smell an opportunity a mile away,” pushed the family from textiles into a far broader base: cotton mills, paper, a fertilizer plant under construction, a viscose rayon unit, chemicals, jute, shipping. This was, in Abdul Razak’s telling, the real decade when Pakistani industry grew, with families like his moving from the primary world of textiles into secondary chemicals and refining.

He came back in 1968 to a country that had begun to turn on those families. The anti-Ayub movement was starting. The economist Mahbub ul Haq had made the famous statement that 22 families controlled the bulk of Pakistani business, and those families became a political target. His was, he acknowledges, among the top few. So he arrived into the flap.

His father wanted him to work in Karachi, under him, in the new air-conditioned building. Abdul Razak was horrified and refused on both counts. The argument went on for weeks until he found the words that ended it: “Father, why don’t you allow me to find my place in the sun? I will never grow if I am under your shadow. You’re too big a man, I’m too small.” His father relented and asked where he wanted to go. Anywhere, he said. They sent him to the family’s Lawrencepur woolen textile mill in District Attock, and within months he had fallen in love with it. By twenty-five or twenty-six he was its managing director.

He admits he arrived knowing nothing about making cloth or yarn. His first meeting with the mill’s managers was a promise rather than a plan: I know nothing about how to make a cloth, but I will work hard and I will learn, and I can bring you what I learned at Columbia, on marketing and production methods. It became, he says, a lovely interaction and a great experience, partly because the outside world made it hard. Labor militancy, left-wing and socialist in flavor, had reached the mill, strike after strike under a strong union that he believes was being instigated by an outsider. It took him about a year to ease that outsider out and build a good relationship with the union.

What is striking is the position he took when a government commission asked whether workers should have the right to strike. Many of his business friends said no. He said yes. He had read the labor laws and concluded they were heavily loaded in favor of management, and that without the real threat of a strike there was no balance. Management, he argued, must know it can get hurt too. The newer industrial relations ordinance restored the right to strike, and he felt that strongly even though his own mill had suffered for it. Lawrencepur also let him finally apply the marketing he had learned at Columbia, launching new products and ladies’ fabrics into segments of a local market that, he felt, did not yet understand market segmentation.

1971, nationalization, and the draining of “business DNA”

He had barely reached calm, in early 1971, when the year turned dramatic. When East Pakistan broke, the family’s large units there became a focus of the crisis. They got their family people out, but the units themselves, the paper mills and the rayon and chemical operations, were taken over by the new Bangladesh government and classified as enemy property. No compensation, from Dhaka or from Islamabad. Nothing.

Then, as the family was still licking its wounds, Bhutto nationalized industry in West Pakistan. “Oh my God,” he remembers thinking, “so all of a sudden we just shrank.” Family members who had each been running different units suddenly had nothing to run. They were given bonds they could only sell at a steep discount, nowhere near what had been taken. The fertilizer plant survived largely because it carried foreign investment. Banks, flour mills, rice mills, and ginning factories followed into state hands.

The loss he lingers on, though, is human, not financial. With the squeeze, family members began emigrating to Canada and America. “We lost a lot of our business DNA,” he says. That, to him, was the major loss.

For Abdul Razak personally, the turn came in 1972, when his uncle asked him to move to Lahore to fix a dispute with the family’s American partner, Hercules, in the urea fertilizer plant that had just come on stream, the business that would become Dawood Hercules. Leaving Lawrencepur was, he says, a very sad day. But the new job stretched him in a completely different direction. Instead of labor and a rural mill, he now spent ninety percent of his time on international partner relationships, corporate issues, and the kind of agreements he had never had to read before. Solving the partnership took over a year, after which he became managing director and spent eight years there. His engineering instincts came alive: process engineering, drawings, materials, construction, maintenance. He did not realize it then, but he was being prepared for what came next.

DESCON: four engineers, one room, and a deliberate gap in the market

By 1977, fault lines were widening inside the family, and people were advising him to get ready for the break. He did. When the family split and he left Dawood Hercules, his father asked what he would do. He said engineering. He started DESCON with four engineers from Dawood Hercules: five men in a room about the size of the studio.

The strategic insight was simple and clear-eyed. In Pakistan at the time, civil engineering was already developed, with reasonable companies in the field. Mechanical and electrical engineering had no organized player, only one-man shows. “I said, this is an opportunity. Why should I compete with civil? Let me go into mechanical.” DESCON began erecting plants from clients’ own drawings, a sugar mill, a small refinery, and work started coming in precisely because there was no proper organized mechanical company.

The job that put DESCON on the map was the National Refinery expansion in Karachi in 1981. Many people warned him it was too big, that he should take a small slice and not risk falling flat. He refused: “I’ve got the energy, I can do it.” DESCON took the mechanical scope, won it, and the three-year project gave the young company both cash flow and a name.

Then he made the move that defined the company. In 1981 he gathered his senior managers, told them to run the refinery job, and announced that Pakistan was too small: DESCON had to go global. He spent his time shuttling between Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia, and in 1982 won the company’s first international job through one of the more memorable scenes in the conversation. DESCON had bid thirty percent below everyone else. The Arab client was baffled, telling him he had surely come to withdraw the bid. No, Abdul Razak said, I have come to ask you to give it to us. Will you make money? No. You’re sure you want it? Yes. He won it, did a good job, and broke even, and was then pre-qualified for all the client’s future work. “I was just buying my admission ticket,” he says. “I don’t care about making money on the first job. I want to settle down here.” That was thirty years ago, and DESCON is still there.

The company kept climbing the value chain: from mechanical to a one-stop shop offering civil, mechanical, and electrical, then into full EPC, engineering, procurement, and construction, where you make the drawings rather than just execute them. He tells the EPC origin story against himself. Unilever asked DESCON to build a hydrogen plant on a turnkey basis. His engineers said they could do it, and they did. But, terrified of damaging the company’s reputation, they specified the very best of everything. “We gave Unilever a Cadillac and charged the price of a Suzuki for it. We lost our shirt on it.” The plant is still running, beautifully over-designed, and the lesson was bitter but formative. Today DESCON operates across Oman, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, with a recent acquisition in South Africa, a facility built by engineers who had grown old with their own company and wanted to sell.

Handing it over in 24 hours

Abdul Razak makes a point of pausing on what he calls the biggest problem in any family business: the transition of power from one generation to the next. For him, circumstance handled it cleanly. When Imran Khan asked him to join the government and he finally said yes, he called the entire company together and announced that at seven o’clock that evening he would walk out of the gates and not come back. He signed over everything to his two sons and the management in a single meeting. Succession, de facto, in 24 hours.

He kept his word. He did not re-enter the premises until after Imran Khan’s government was voted out, and even then he did not reclaim his old seat. He is not chairman of any of the companies, not on their boards, does not attend strategic meetings. He tells his sons and the management to treat him as a reference library: a library calls no one and summons no one; you come to it if you want advice, and you are free not to. While he was away, his sons diversified the group beyond engineering into agriculture: micronutrients tailored to specific soils, marketing of agricultural products, and a serious research farm. He says only that he wishes he had started those other things earlier.

BARD Foundation: the one thing almost no one funds

Now, he says, he spends none of his energy earning money and all of it spending money. The vehicle is the BARD Foundation, named for Bilkis and Abdullah Razak Dawood. Education is one pillar, fitting for a man who taught on the Punjab University MBA program from 1975 to about 1981, co-founded LUMS with Syed Babar Ali, and remains its pro-chancellor. “There is no better equalizer than education,” he says. “And the other good equalizer is sports.”

That second equalizer is where the foundation does something unusual. Health is crowded with donors; sports is almost empty. So BARD’s charter is simple: any Pakistani, man or woman, with the spirit of adventure and the courage and determination to reach the international level in sport, will be backed. He reels off the stories with obvious delight. Naila Kiani came and asked if the foundation would fund her to climb K2; they did, she did it, and now they are asking her to tour universities so young people see that it can be done. A nine- or ten-year-old tennis player, Rebecca, swept the under-12 tournaments. And then there is Anya, an eleven-year-old who won across Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan, reached a semi-final in Athens against the best young players in the world, and was spotted by IMG, which asked the foundation to guarantee two years of backing while the academy in Florida trained her with a team of coaches for tennis, nutrition, and physical and mental development. The whole family moved with her. Visiting that academy, he says, was mind-blowing: only then do you understand what it takes to compete against the world-class.

He is honest that funding individuals, however thrilling, will not move the needle nationally. So a group of them has spent months designing something bigger: surveying how many football fields actually exist in Karachi and Lahore (he was surprised to find an adequate number, simply lying dormant), and standing up a transparent, open league structure that anyone can join or leave. He would rather build the institution properly than rush it. He and Muzamil spend a long stretch on why Pakistan, so saturated in sport, has failed to turn it into a business the way the PSL finally did for cricket. They agree the country has the talent and the affinity, but not yet the promoters and structures to convert it.

Africa, exports, and the long argument for making things

The last stretch is policy, drawn from his time as Adviser on Commerce, where he says he focused on three things: exports, regional connectivity, and industrial development.

On Africa, his point is scale. The ministry’s own analysis showed Africa is roughly the size of India as a market, about 1.2 billion people, and largely ignored by Pakistani exporters. He took a large business delegation to Kenya, then to Nigeria after COVID, trying to open his own business community’s eyes. With the continent moving toward a single free-trade area, goods could one day ship right across it. On regional connectivity, he describes the grind of building trade and transit agreements with Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Kyrgyzstan, and the TIR protocol that lets a sealed Pakistani truck run from Pakistan to Moscow, or through Iran into Turkey, without being stopped at every border. Karachi, he notes, is the natural port both for Central Asia reaching toward Africa and for Africa reaching toward Central Asia, but the bottlenecks are physical and require serious investment at the borders.

On exports, his frustration is plain. For thirty years, he argues, no government has understood that an export-led growth strategy is the only way forward, because Pakistan simply does not earn enough dollars. When focus did land, in his telling textiles grew sharply and IT grew faster still, it worked. He pushed to strip anti-export taxes off raw materials, and championed the unglamorous machinery of trade: geographical indications, so that Basmati, the Multani tile, and the Peshawari chappal are protected as Pakistani brands (he recalls writing to Ralph Lauren over chappals, only to find Pakistan lacked the laws), and the Madrid protocol, which registers a brand across dozens of countries at once. The deeper diagnosis he and Muzamil land on is about manufacturing itself. A Pakistani car has at most forty to forty-five percent local content; a tractor nearly a hundred, which is why tractors can be exported and cars cannot. He points to China, which lived with a single car model for fifteen years until it understood and could make every part, then designed its own. Pakistan, by contrast, demands variety it has not earned, and has become, he says, a consumption-led economy rather than an export-led one. It is a solvable problem, he insists. It just takes time and persistence across governments, which is exactly what Pakistan tends not to give it.

No regrets, and a country at a crucial stage

Muzamil ends where he often does, but first asks something more personal: given the East Pakistan loss, the nationalization, everything, does he regret coming back to Pakistan? The answer is unequivocal. No regrets at all. When the nationalization hit, seniors offered to move him to Canada; he chose to stay. His brothers went. Years later they sat down and compared: the children on both sides went to American universities, the work got done on both sides, and they concluded that staying in Pakistan had been the right decision. “I believe it. I think it was one of the best decisions I took.”

On Pakistan in 2050, he reaches for history. America in 1865, mid-civil-war with Lincoln assassinated, looked finished and was not. Germany after the First World War, Russia after the revolution, China: all passed through near-despair before becoming strong. Pakistan, he says, is at a very crucial stage, in for a low, rough stretch of the roller coaster, its society perhaps ripped for a time. But the country is only seventy-five years old, “and there’s nothing in the making of a nation” in that. His instruction to himself and his friends is the same one that runs through the whole conversation: keep doing what you are doing, do not stop. It will be difficult and acrimonious and slow, but he has every hope they will get through. Muzamil, who calls it one of the most profound conversations he has had in 300 episodes, lets the optimism stand as the closing note.