Pakistan is the largest underserved retail market in the world

A career built across industries, not inside one

The episode opens with Muzamil clarifying something he has had to repeat in recent weeks: Thought Behind Things does not run sponsored conversations. The episode with Kamran Shaukat, co-founder and CEO of EZBuy Pakistan and the man behind Kian Furniture’s Middle East and Africa operation, sits under the technology pillar of the show, not under any commercial arrangement. With that out of the way, Muzamil asks Kamran to start at the beginning.

The beginning is not in one place. Kamran did his O-levels in Jeddah, where his father was teaching at King Abdul Aziz University, then his FSC at Sir Syed in Rawalpindi, then enrolled at UET Lahore in the batch of 1988. A killing on campus during the return of democracy convinced his mother to pull him out. The family did not build their house. They sent him to the University of Maryland instead. He returned to Pakistan with an electrical engineering degree and joined Alcatel in 1993 as a production planner, working on the telephone exchanges Alcatel was building under a contract with the government.

Alcatel, he tells Muzamil, was his first love. It was also where he picked up the principle that has carried him through every job since. “If you have a good process, you’ll get the same product each time. If you don’t, you’ll have a piece of art.” Pakistan, in his reading, manufactures pieces of art. It cannot scale them.

The McDonald’s lesson: your suppliers are your arms and legs

After five years at Alcatel and a brief, uncomfortable stint at a Dutch tobacco machinery firm, Kamran joined McDonald’s in June 1998 as an equipment manager — a deceptively narrow title that covered everything that fell out of a restaurant when you turned it upside down. Seating, signage, décor, kids’ areas, furniture. He arrived three months before McDonald’s opened its first Pakistan store.

The country opening was supposed to be in Karachi, at the Golden Gate location. A madrasa nearby reacted to Clinton’s missile strikes on Osama bin Laden in Kenya by pelting the under-construction restaurant. The American team, Kamran says, was naive about the difference between good and bad guys. They moved the opening to Lahore. On day one, twenty-two thousand people queued. The drive-through line ran from 63 Main Boulevard all the way to the big circle at Main Gulberg — tongas, motorcycles, cycles, cars, even Mian Sahab.

It is the McDonald’s chapter that Kamran says will take up two or three chapters in any book he writes. Two lessons stand out. The first, which he attributes to a philosophy that traces back to Ray Kroc: “Your suppliers are your arms and legs. Treat them with respect — one plus one can be eleven, because they know more about the customer than you individually as a company.” The second, which he learned at the firm’s Oak Brook headquarters after being transferred to do an executive MBA at the University of Chicago, was about the source of American corporate strength. “American companies are very successful because they take the best out of people. They play to people’s strengths. They pay them according to what they can deliver and their brain power — not where they’re from, not what their religion is, not what their gender is.”

Forever Young and the move to Malaysia

When McDonald’s stock crashed from around 40 dollars to the low teens in 2004, Kamran’s professors at Chicago Booth called it a dead cat jump. He repeated the phrase to his boss, who told him to watch. The company brought in a new CMO, Larry Light, who built the Forever Young rebrand — the idea that a brand can stay perpetually young by reinventing itself, the way Bond or Volkswagen had done. Light assembled a team of sixteen. Kamran volunteered.

His pitch was simple. He knew the Chinese suppliers, he knew Asia, and he would deliver the new fit-out at half the cost. McDonald’s, which had been shipping American furniture and Cypriot sign poles to Latvia, Poland and Pakistan, agreed. Kamran asked to be based where his father was then teaching: Kuala Lumpur. Within six months he and his wife had decided they were not going back. His green-card application became irrelevant. “Life is not about them. It’s about us. Your own brand is more important than any of these companies. You can run from any company. You can’t run from yourself.”

Shell, ninety KPIs and the eight-hundred-page contract

Shell hired him out of Singapore in 2007 as head of CapEx and OpEx for global retail — the petrol-station business. The job, he discovered, was not what he thought. A week in, his Scottish boss in London asked him to read the global supplier contract on his flight over. Kamran printed it. Eight hundred pages. He skipped to the last page, counted ninety KPIs, and watched two movies on Singapore Airlines instead.

In London, in the Shell House overlooking the Thames, he told the boss they should cut the KPIs from ninety to five and that the real task — the one that had not been written down — was to take Shell’s thousand engineers across forty countries down to twenty and outsource the function. He did it over three and a half years, taking global retail capex from a billion dollars to six hundred and sixty million. It cost him his hair and, he suspects, his patience with corporate scale. “Emotionally exhausting and physically flying all over the place with the family based in Singapore,” he tells Muzamil. He started phoning his university network for a way out.

Walmart, an exit list, and keeping Pakistan on the map

Walmart Global Sourcing hired him in 2010 as a senior director in Shenzhen. China, he says, was a party then — a kind of Las Vegas. His first project was as interesting as supply chain gets: define where Walmart’s supplier base should sit, and how much business each country should get. The internal matrix already classified each market as enter, exit or sustain. Pakistan was on the exit list.

Kamran’s intervention, which he admits was partly biased, was strategic. If Walmart pulled out, JCPenney, Kmart and Michaels would walk in and buy up the excess capacity. There was no benefit to leaving. Walmart stayed, and Pakistan remained a four-hundred-million-dollar sourcing market for them. Over seven years, the company added hardlines, consumer health and wellness, electronics and entertainment, toys and seasonal to his portfolio. His personal book of business reached five billion dollars a year.

By 2017, he was bored. Walmart is an aircraft carrier; it does not turn quickly. He left for Astro, a Malaysian media house, to run the e-commerce joint venture they had set up with a Korean home-shopping company called Go Shop. He reached fifty million dollars in sales with fifty products — unheard of for someone who used to do it across thousands of SKUs. The culture, though, did not work. “What was not said was more important than what was said. It’s a very Far East type thing. Pakistanis are expressive. In the Western world, people articulate thoughts. Here I couldn’t tell.”

Why he bet on Pakistan

This is the question Muzamil keeps circling back to. Kamran had the Singapore passport. He had the corporate options. He could have gone back to the US, where his earlier green card application sat. Why Pakistan?

His answer is not sentimental. It is structural. “This is one of the biggest opportunities for retail in the world. It’s a totally underserved, underserviced market. Two hundred and twenty million people, and nobody’s figured out a way where human beings can survive without food. If you’re in retail food, you’re going to do well. If you’re in clothing, you’re going to do well.” He adds a personal coda: in every market he had lived in, he was happy but not content. In Pakistan, he is not happy — the standard of living is too visibly low for that — but he is content, because he belongs here.

The second leg of the bet was a relationship. Kamran had been mentoring people in China for years, and one of them sat on the board at EZBuy in Singapore. EZBuy’s founder, Vincent Chobin, agreed to meet. Kamran had prepared a deck full of numbers. Vincent walked in wearing shorts and flip-flops. Kamran threw out the deck. “I said, Vincent, you know why I’m here? Because Pakistan and China are brothers. He said, yes, I know. That’s why I see you. Pakistan’s really off the radar right now.”

EZBuy Pakistan: from five million SKUs to two and a half million

EZBuy Pakistan launched on the first of August 2018 after a March pilot. The team is around twenty-eight people and the company, Kamran tells Muzamil, is profitable. The initial pitch was “we buy the world for you” — five million SKUs, the largest range in Pakistan. That, he admits, was naive. People started ordering sofa sets and treadmills, the ship-borne logistics broke under volumetric weight, and the unit economics did not work.

So they narrowed. EZBuy now lists around two and a half million SKUs, almost all of them under a kilogram. The catalogue is concentrated in female fashion — lingerie, tank tops, sneakers, bags, opticals. Eighty-five to eighty-six percent of customers are women. The model is cross-border. An order placed on EZBuy drops in Shanghai and at the Pakistan office simultaneously; the product is sourced, shipped, cleared and delivered in twenty to thirty days. EZBuy carries the risk end to end, including on cash on delivery, which Kamran says they are the largest provider of in their segment. Returned goods cannot go back to China, so they get refurbished and put on flash sale.

He is also clear about where EZBuy is going. Brands like L’Oreal do not manufacture in Pakistan, so by the time they hand a margin to EZBuy there is little room left. The future, he says, is white-label — non-branded goods at a fraction of the cost of a Sony or a Bose headset, sold to a customer who cares about quality more than the logo.

Kian Furniture and the logistics math that changed the Middle East

The Kian Furniture business sits alongside EZBuy. Kian supplies commercial furniture across eight verticals — outdoor seating, hotels and restaurants, quick service, education, workplace solutions. Customers include McDonald’s, KFC, Americana and Burger King on the QSR side, and Movenpick, Ritz Carlton and Sheraton on the hospitality side. Kamran is setting up factories in Pakistan, India and Cairo, and a joint venture in Saudi Arabia, where, he says, the changes of the last three years exceed the previous fifty.

The reason regional manufacturing has become urgent is a single number. “A restaurant furniture package used to be twenty thousand dollars. Logistics from China used to be a thousand dollars. Today the package is twenty thousand and logistics is also twenty thousand. People are not building many restaurants in the Middle East unless they can source close by — Karachi, Cairo, Delhi, Mumbai.” Pakistan already has the wood, the inlay shops, the powder coating and the laminate suppliers. Whatever is missing, importers are already bringing in. The machinery is here. The work is connecting it to a spec sheet that defines, down to the microns of powder coat on a table leg, what McDonald’s will accept.

The China bet, the BRI, and what Pakistan should stop doing

Muzamil pushes on geopolitics. Kamran’s view is that Pakistan happens to sit on the right real estate at the right time. India cannot trade with Central Asia, Iran or the Middle East without Pakistan. Nor can China. Nor can the Middle East reach the emerging markets to the east without it. He has seen the Belt and Road plan — “a thirty-year plan by the Communist Party” — and his read is that if Pakistan can outsource enough of the execution to the Chinese, who will be surgical about it, the GDP and manufacturing gains will be real. He estimates three to four million Chinese living in Pakistan within three to five years.

On the structural changes Pakistan needs, he is specific. Import duties protect bad local manufacturing more than they protect anything else. “What’s essential shouldn’t be up to the government — it’s for me. If I’m earning four thousand rupees and I want to buy a shoe, branded or not, what does the government have to do with it?” Setting up a company should take hours, not months. And the relationship with India is, in his view, the most structural problem of all. “You can’t continue to have an enemy seven times your size and grow optimally. We need to spend a third of our money on the armed forces. It’s a circle. This needs to be settled.”

He pushes back gently on his Indian friends as well. “You’re the bigger brother. You should be more giving. If a younger one is troubling you, show a little bit of love.”

Where Pakistan is in 2030

Muzamil closes with the question he asks every guest — where Pakistan will be in 2050. Kamran will not play. “I plan my career three to five years out. Maximum ten. 2050 is too far.” But he will commit to 2030 to 2035. If Pakistan makes regulation lighter, welcomes investment, and lets people get on with what they are doing, it will be a major production hub, a vibrant retail and supply chain market, and an exporter at scale. If, on top of that, the spat with India is settled and even a hundred rupees a truck starts flowing across the border, “there’ll be so much money in this country, you wouldn’t know what to do with it.”

He delivers it the way he has delivered everything else in the conversation — as a man who has run the numbers, knows the suppliers, and is not interested in the rhetorical version of the question. “Hold on to your pants.”