Pakistan's electric scooter winner isn't selling to bike owners

A 200-square-foot shop on McLeod Road

The episode opens with Muzamil framing a thesis he has been chasing across this Endeavor Pakistan series — that despite a brutal downturn, real winners are finally emerging in categories that everyone said would never work in Pakistan. Electric two-wheelers is one of them. His guest is Saad Farrukh, CEO of Evee, the company that now leads the segment.

Saad’s origin story has nothing to do with electric vehicles. He was born in Karachi in 1989, raised in Lahore, and grew up watching his father run a spare-parts shop on McLeod Road. The family business was in auto components — two-wheeler, three-wheeler, four-wheeler, retail and wholesale all mixed together. “We belong to the Chiniot Sheikh family,” he tells Muzamil. “Over there it’s very hard to pick a person who is into the job. We are the maimans of Punjab.”

He finished his bachelor’s in finance at Lahore School of Economics in 2011, took one extra year to do an MBA in marketing, and joined his father in 2012. The first day on the job is the moment he keeps returning to. He had walked in expecting to make business decisions. Instead, customers arrived and there were not enough seats in the cramped 200-square-foot shop, so he had to give up his chair. His father then, very candidly, asked him to bring tea. “That was my first job at work, completing my MBA, like sixteen years of education, and that is my job.”

He says it without bitterness. The point he wants Muzamil to land on is the one he thinks first-generation graduates in Punjab miss — that joining the family shop is not a failure mode, and that nobody should be hard on themselves or on their kids for taking that path. He never sent out a CV. He never gave a job interview for himself. He knew this was where he was going.

The shift from two-stroke to four-stroke — and an opening

What changed his role in the shop was a generational shift in the underlying product. When he joined in 2012, the Pakistani two-wheeler market was completing a transition from two-stroke engines to four-stroke. His father’s traditional supply lines ran through Europe and Taiwan, which dominated two-stroke. The four-stroke business was sourced from China — and that became Saad’s territory.

He started travelling to China two or three times a year. He moved the shop from purely walk-in retail to a distribution network, appointing dealers in every city so customers no longer had to come to McLeod Road. By 2017 he had spotted a new sub-segment — cargo loaders, the three-wheeler delivery vehicles that were just starting to enter the Pakistani market. A few customers were already asking for spare parts. He started building a list.

When he told his father he wanted to import the parts, the reply was characteristically blunt: “You will bring parts that you will not be able to add up.” That was the only intervention. The clarity was that this would be Saad’s project — his father would not run interference, but he would not help either. By the time Saad realised the business he wanted to build required a full assembly plant rather than a spare-parts catalogue, he had already committed. “I had heard this work takes six months. It took three and a half years.”

The cargo loader bet that did not work

The factory took until late 2020 to fully license. The first formal shipment of cargo loaders did not move until early 2021. By that point, the market had moved on. Players had settled, dealer networks were locked in, consumers had picked their brands. Saad spent eighteen months trying to push the product through a saturated market, giving credit he did not have, taking discounts that hurt margins, and watching the cash flow on both the new business and the parent spare-parts business turn negative.

By the third quarter of 2022, the situation was bad enough that he needed a new product. The factory was built. The team was hired. Walking away was not an option. The pivot to electric scooters did not come from a policy document or a market study. It came from his own China trips. From 2010 onwards, every time he visited, he saw more electric two-wheelers on the road. Somewhere in the back of his mind he had started thinking that he would not ride a motorcycle in Pakistan — that as an adult Chiniot Sheikh, the bike was not the right vehicle for him. The scooter was. And the electric scooter, increasingly, was the future.

In 2020, while still waiting on the cargo loader licence, he had quietly imported ten to fifteen sample electric scooters from China — different colours, designs and specs — and used them to figure out what worked. By 2022, that two-year unconscious market research suddenly mattered. He decided to connect the dots.

Why he refused to do an electric bike

Muzamil pushes hard on this point, because the obvious move would have been to electrify the motorcycle — the vehicle that Pakistan already understood. Saad is precise about why he refused.

By the time he received his EDB licence as the seventeenth player in electric two-wheelers, sixteen companies had already tried electric bikes. He watched them, and he drew three conclusions. First, the motorcycle chassis is engineered as a fuel vehicle, not as an electric one — converting it imports compromises on both sides. Second, the pitch to a fuel-bike owner is fundamentally a savings pitch, and savings pitches do not survive contact with reality once the customer realises the output is lower, that he cannot ride it rough and tough, and that he cannot put his whole family of four on it. Third, and most damning, the perceived value collapses. “If I have spent 250,000 rupees and I am going on the road, how would you know I have spent 250,000? For you I have only spent 150,000. So the perceived value of that product even today is 150,000. Even though I have spent 250,000, I do not even get the feel-good factor.”

Saad’s read of the failed players was not bitter — it was grateful. “They did not tell me, but they made me understand very well that I should not do bikes. I should do scooters.”

The consumer Pakistan was not selling to

By the time Muzamil asks for current numbers, the picture is clear. Evee delivered 800 units in year one. 8,000 in year two. The target for 2025 is 25,000. They have already hit it cumulatively. They have over 100 dealerships across Pakistan and they are now the segment leader.

Muzamil asks the obvious question — what is the single biggest driver? Saad refuses to pick from the menu of market acceptance, Gen Z openness, or government policy. The real answer, he says, is about a consumer Pakistan was never serving in the first place. “The core reason is that we have given our consumer independence.” His target buyer is the person who cannot afford a car and does not want a bike — the commuter doing two, five, fifteen, thirty kilometres a day, currently dependent on a ride-hailing app, a friend, a family member, a rickshaw, or a bus. None of those were customers of the existing motorcycle industry.

The data confirms the structural shift. In the conventional two-wheeler market, women made up less than 0.1 percent of riders. In Evee’s customer base, women are 20 percent. “It means that my market size, if not double, very easily becomes 1.5x.” He also sells to the elderly through his three-wheel personal mobility product. The total addressable market for two-wheelers in Pakistan, he argues, was never the two crore bikes already on the road. Those riders were already served. The real market was the people who were not on a vehicle at all.

What the policy actually looks like from the factory floor

Muzamil presses on the Punjab government’s stated target — 30 percent of new two-wheeler sales electric by 2030. From the outside, it looks aggressive. From inside the industry, Saad thinks the number will be hit earlier. The total electric two-wheeler market crossed roughly 25,000 units in 2024 and is on track for 100,000 in 2025 — a 4x year-on-year jump. He expects the next fiscal year to land somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000.

His comment on government policy is unusually pointed for a podcast guest. “We talk a lot about our government. I do too, personally. But in my two years in electric vehicles, I would say the government cannot be more supportive of this industry.” He points to the GST gap as evidence. Fuel two-wheelers carry 18 percent GST. Electric two-wheelers carry 1 percent. Customs duties on the electric side are minimal. “It is not just intent. It is not just dry support. The policy is actually supportive.”

The three-wheeler story is different, and he is clear about why. The end consumer — the rickshaw driver — cannot afford the vehicle. He has 25,000 to 50,000 rupees in his pocket against a 400,000-rupee unit. The business model only works if a dealer finances him, which means the OEM is always one step removed from its own customer. Saad walked away from three-wheelers for that exact reason. The only way the segment electrifies, in his view, is through a direct government purchase order. No private operator will burn cash chasing a market where the unit economics do not close.

The unit economics that make the pitch land

The economic case for Evee’s scooter, by Saad’s own breakdown, is now hard to argue with. Two units of electricity charge it fully — roughly 150 rupees, for 60 to 70 kilometres of range. That is a cost per kilometre of around 2 rupees. The comparison is not just to a fuel bike at 8 to 10 rupees per kilometre. It is to ride-hailing apps and to dependency on a relative’s vehicle.

Maintenance is the second piece. There is no oil change. The brand offers a twenty-month after-sales warranty with home service. The graphene batteries come from what he describes as a renowned Chinese supplier and have a tried-and-tested decade behind them.

But Saad is careful to flag that he does not pitch the economic case the way founders normally do. “I do not look at it like that. For me, it is like you buy your phone. When you buy your phone, you do not think how much you will sell it for two years later. You think what value it is adding to your life.” His target buyer is not optimising a spreadsheet. They are buying their first personal vehicle.

The VC pitch that went nowhere

By the time the conversation turns to financing, Saad is direct in a way that the segment rarely is on a Pakistani podcast. He bootstrapped from the parent business through the cargo loader years. He survived the pivot because the factory was already built — he only needed to alter it, not to break ground. He took $300,000 to $400,000 of personal capital across the early years to get the EV plant operational.

Then he pitched every venture capital firm in Pakistan. “I do not think there is any renowned VC in Pakistan I have not pitched, directly or indirectly.” None of them invested. He started in 2023 and through the first half of 2024, which he and Muzamil agree was the worst possible window — VCs were conservative, hardware was out of favour, and the swappable battery thesis was the only EV model getting attention.

He is not bitter about the rejections. “I will speak very positively about pitching to the VCs, because I would prepare for a week before every pitch — what slides, what data, what numbers, what should go where. I did not get the money, but the preparation became material I used the next day in my own business.” By the time he was profitable enough not to need the capital, he stopped pitching.

Last fiscal year, Evee did $7 million in revenue. The target for the current year is 3x.

The Chinese contrast and the answer to “what should we fix”

Muzamil closes the conversation with the question he has been asking every guest in this Endeavor Pakistan series — if you could fix one thing about doing business in Pakistan, what would it be? Saad’s answer is one of the sharper ones in the series. He refuses the premise. “Do not fix the industry, fix yourself. Fix your business, fix your numbers, fix your product, fix your service, fix your team. We as a startup do not have the weight to fix anything outside our locus of control.”

He extends the same point to the China comparison. He has been travelling there for fifteen years, speaks some of the language, has friends in most major cities. The cleanest way he can describe the difference is wind direction. “They are going with the wind. We are going against the wind. And sometimes our external forces feel that we are not enjoying it enough, so let us throw a stone from above, let us add a little more difficulty.” The conclusion he draws from that is not despair — it is that anyone who builds something real in Pakistan against that headwind has earned every inch of it.

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil reflects on what he has been hearing across this series — ordinary founders, not textile barons, building $15 to $100 million businesses in categories everyone said would not work. Saad gets the last word, via a story about his masters professor who had been asked, in the troubled early 2010s, what would become of Pakistan. The professor went into flashback, remembered the Bhutto era, remembered the seventies, and laughed. The country had been written off then too. It was not, in the end, written off.

Evee’s number for 2025 — 25,000 units, 100-plus dealerships, segment leader, fully bootstrapped — is one more data point in the same direction.