PakWheels wasn't revenue positive until 2022

From a shared washroom in Lahore to Pakistan’s car internet

The episode opens with Muzamil noting that listeners had been asking for this guest for at least a year. Suneel Sarfraz Munj, Co-Founder and Chairman of PakWheels, carries what Muzamil calls a “cult following” unusual for someone in their forties — built not through a media company but through two decades of talking honestly about cars.

Suneel’s background is grounded and unglamorous. He grew up in Lahore, moving gradually from a small home with a shared washroom to Garden Town to Gulberg as the family’s circumstances improved. He studied economics with a mathematics and computer science component at LUMS, graduating in 2002. Before PakWheels consumed his professional life, he had tried gift-item retail, wholesale and retail of meat, and a utility-store supply contract. None of it held his attention. Cars did.

PakWheels was founded in 2003 by a co-founder who had returned from Dubai, where he had worked in gold trading before commodity prices equalised globally. The site began as a forum — a place where people who were, in Suneel’s words, “paagl wheelers,” genuinely obsessed with cars, could gather and share information. That forum archive, he says, remains a gold mine today.

Why online classifieds were always going to win

The transition from forum to classified platform was not a strategic pivot so much as an obvious observation. Muzamil, who is 42, remembers the ritual: buy the Sunday newspaper, open the three or four pages of car listings, take a highlighter, call numbers, and discover that half the cars were already sold or never existed.

Suneel’s argument is structural. “Inherently, jo online classified hai, they are superior to offline.” A newspaper ad lives for one day. An online listing lives indefinitely. A newspaper ad cannot carry photographs or a detailed description — the seller was limited to shorthand like “army officer ki istemal ki hui” or “lady doctor ki chalai hui.” An online listing can carry two hundred data points. You can save it, share it, compare it. The newspaper cannot do any of that.

“We were the first one in Pakistan to launch online classified,” Suneel says, and that first-mover advantage, he argues, played a pivotal role in everything that followed. The newspaper industry’s giants initially dismissed PakWheels as irrelevant. Within three years, the market had turned completely.

Carmudi arrived, and then it left

Muzamil asks Suneel about the competitive threat that arrived mid-journey. Suneel names Carmudi — a well-funded international entrant that came into the Pakistani market with significant capital and then exited just as quickly. His reading of that episode is instructive.

“Market mein paisa phenko, throw money at the face of the problem and get it solved” — that was the playbook Carmudi brought. It did not work. What worked, Suneel argues, was ground knowledge, sincerity with the customer, and a genuine understanding of pain points. PakWheels had spent years accumulating all three. An external player with a chequebook but no local depth could not replicate that quickly enough.

The lesson he draws is not triumphalist. He notes that when you disrupt an industry, you must be ready to be disrupted yourself. The point is to keep solving the next pain point before someone else does.

The inspection service, and three years to sign one bank

After classifieds, the next pain point PakWheels identified was trust in used-car transactions. Buying a used car in Pakistan carried none of the certainty of buying a new one. You did not know the car’s true condition, its accident history, or its actual market value.

PakWheels built an inspection service. For a fee that varies by vehicle category — hatchback, entry-level sedan, and so on — a PakWheels team visits the seller’s location, inspects the car across more than two hundred points, and delivers a digital report to the buyer. “Agar aap apni gaadi bech rahe honge, aap apni gaadi ke baare mein itna nahi pata hoga jitni detail us report mein aayegi,” Suneel says.

The next step was integrating this with banks. Banks wanted to lend against used cars but had no reliable way to value them. PakWheels had the inspection infrastructure and the market credibility. The fit was obvious — but getting the first bank to sign took Suneel three years of persistent effort. Dubai Islamic Bank was first. Then Alfalah, then MCB, then Bank Islami, Soneri, Standard Chartered. Today, he says, all major banks with used-car financing portfolios work with PakWheels.

The business model throughout remains consistent: PakWheels is not buying or selling cars. “Main bada clear hoon ki we are in business of lead generation,” Suneel says. The platform connects buyers, sellers, insurers, leasers, and parts suppliers. It does not take inventory risk.

Sell It For Me: aligning incentives

Later in the discussion, Muzamil asks about PakWheels’ “Sell It For Me” service — a more active intermediation product where PakWheels manages the sale of a car on behalf of the owner. The business model is simple: the seller gets a discounted inspection, and if the car sells, PakWheels charges one percent of the sale price. On a ten-lakh-rupee car, that is ten thousand rupees.

Suneel’s framing of why this works is about incentive alignment. “Mera aur aapka incentive aligned hai.” PakWheels only earns if the car sells, and it earns more if the car sells for more. There is no conflict of interest. The platform’s motivation is to get the seller the best possible price, as quickly as possible.

He is careful to note that even here, PakWheels is not a dealer. It does not take ownership of the car. It is a managed marketplace, not a trading business.

Thirteen manufacturers, still two lakh cars

A significant portion of the conversation turns to Pakistan’s broader auto industry. Muzamil asks Suneel to trace the impact of the 2016 auto policy and its successor, and to explain why, despite a wave of new entrants, the market has not grown proportionally.

The 2016 policy offered five-year incentives to attract new manufacturers. Thirteen companies entered with CKD production commitments; two more came in as brownfield investments. Every CEO Suneel interviewed at the time said Pakistan had never seen such a favourable auto policy. Then the budget arrived without the promised leasing facilitation, and the financing market that was supposed to absorb new demand evaporated.

The structural problem is stark. When Pakistan had three manufacturers — the “big three” — total annual production was roughly two lakh cars. With thirteen manufacturers now in the market, total production is still roughly two lakh cars. The market has not expanded. Suneel’s explanation is that market size is the binding constraint, not competition. Dollar availability, import costs for components, and consumer purchasing power all cap demand before competition between manufacturers becomes the relevant variable.

He does see a long-term positive: more manufacturers mean more prospective customers for the vendor ecosystem — seat makers, tyre manufacturers, plastic component suppliers. More customers mean more investment in local production capacity. More local production means lower per-unit costs over time. But he is honest that this is a long horizon. “Jab teen company thi tab bhi Pakistan ki auto manufacturing jo total banati thi do lakh gaadiyaan thi, aur terahon do lakh bana rahe hain.”

The on culture, and who benefits from artificial scarcity

Muzamil mentions buying a Hyundai Elantra in November — just before delivery times collapsed — and getting it in twenty-six days. That window closed quickly. The conversation turns to the “on” culture: the premium buyers pay above list price to jump the queue, which at various points reached three to five lakh rupees depending on the model.

Suneel’s analysis is unsentimental. During COVID, manufacturers cut from two production shifts to one. Supply fell. Demand, when the market reopened, was strong — partly because certain segments of the economy, including pharmaceuticals and shipping, had done well. Manufacturers observed that excess demand was maintaining or increasing the resale value of their cars. They had no incentive to restore full production quickly. Artificial scarcity was profitable.

“Yahi manufacturer hai jo unnees mein aapko off dete the, aapko delay diya karte the, aapko perks offer kiya karte the.” The same companies that were discounting and incentivising in 2019 were collecting premiums in 2021 and 2022. Suneel does not excuse this, but he also does not pretend it is irrational from the manufacturer’s perspective.

Electric vehicles: the policy gap and the incumbent problem

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil and Suneel spend time on electric vehicles. The picture Suneel paints is of a policy environment that announces the right things and then fails to implement them consistently. Punjab registers electric vehicles under an equivalent combustion-engine CC classification, with fees running into lakhs. Islamabad’s capital territory charges a few thousand. The inconsistency is not accidental — it reflects the absence of a unified national framework.

The deeper problem is incumbent resistance. Toyota, Honda, and Hyundai have invested heavily in combustion-engine production lines in Pakistan. None of them are electric-ready. “None of them would want electric right now because they are not ready.” If electric vehicles were aggressively incentivised, new players — not the incumbents — would benefit. The incumbents have every reason to slow that transition.

Suneel’s broader point about Pakistan’s energy economics is sharp. Pakistan has excess electricity generation capacity and pays capacity charges regardless of consumption. Every electric vehicle that displaces a petrol car reduces fuel imports and increases domestic electricity consumption — which is exactly what the grid needs. The economics of the transition are favourable for the country. The politics of it, shaped by incumbent manufacturers and inconsistent provincial policies, are not.

What success means after nineteen years

Muzamil closes by asking Suneel about the future — of the auto industry, and of PakWheels itself. Suneel is cautiously optimistic about Pakistan’s young generation. “Jo hamare opinion makers hain, jo hamare bachche aaj ki nayi nasl hai, unko aap chup nahi kara sakte.” The information asymmetry that defined earlier decades — the sense that questions should not be asked, that authority should not be challenged — has broken down. He sees that as structurally positive.

On the auto industry, he expects consolidation. Not all thirteen new entrants will survive the market test. On electric vehicles, he is sceptical of the 2030 global transition timeline. “Mujhe nahi lagta frankly, between you and me.” The technology is still expensive, the infrastructure is not there, and Pakistan’s carbon footprint is low enough that the urgency felt in Europe or the United States does not translate directly.

On PakWheels itself, Suneel is disarmingly honest. The company was not revenue positive until 2022 — the first full year of profitability after nearly two decades of operation. “If success is money, I am not successful at all.” What he counts instead is the recognition: people stopping him to say that PakWheels changed how they bought or sold a car. He is equally direct about startup valuations. Raising a large round at a high valuation is not success. “Aap apni company ki bikri kar rahe hain.” You are selling equity, not building wealth.

The conversation could have run much longer — Muzamil notes they never got to the startup ecosystem at all. What it covered was enough: a rare, unhurried account of what it actually takes to build something real in Pakistan, over a very long time, without shortcuts.