Why Pakistan's factories still push, when the world has moved to pull

A career that nobody planned

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing Badar Khushnood as a titan of Pakistan’s technology industry — current chairman of P@SHA, co-founder of Bramerz, and a member of the National e-Commerce Council under the Ministry of Commerce. The conversation has been a long time coming. Badar is based in Lahore, the schedule never quite lined up, and now that he is finally in front of the microphone Muzamil wants to start from the beginning.

The beginning is not a tech beginning. Badar took his FSc in pre-engineering at Crescent in Lahore, planning to join the Air Force. His father, from a business family, opened the engineering books one day, saw what his son was studying, and quietly ended the project. Badar switched to general science, economics and statistics, with the family business as the destination. Then his father passed away before Badar finished college, and the course of his life changed again. He ended up at the Lahore School of Economics doing a masters in economics and management. “That’s where my traditional education mindset changed,” he tells Muzamil. The rote system gave way to case studies. He learned to talk, to present, to observe.

His introduction to the internet was incidental. A classmate’s father worked at PTCL and had been given a free dial-up account as an employee perk. The classmate had no interest. Badar shared the login. The 14k, then 56k, modem at home became the place he dismantled DOS, RAM, ROM and hard disks, learning by curiosity rather than by syllabus. His mother used to shout from downstairs telling his siblings to cut the wires upstairs because she thought he was wasting his time. He calls her, fondly, a digital immigrant.

That self-taught computing showed up in his first interview at Nishat Chunian, the textile group. They asked him to set up Excel formulas. He could. He stayed three years exporting cloth.

The first B2B portal, and the U-turn that killed it

What follows is one of the most underdocumented chapters of Pakistan’s digital history, and Badar tells it plainly. After Nishat, friends from LSE who had joined SMEDA — the government body for SMEs — called him in to fix a website that worked locally but broke on the server. Badar diagnosed it in minutes: the development machine was Windows, the server was Linux, and the file names were case-sensitive on one and not the other. SMEDA hired him as a consultant, then as a full employee.

Then came the bigger ask. SMEDA wanted to launch Pakistan’s first B2B portal in three months. Badar told them no domestic technology could be built that quickly. He suggested a partnership. They asked with whom. He wrote to Alibaba, directly. Jack Ma’s wife, who was a co-founder, replied. They wanted to work with Pakistan. “Remember, my email ID was gov.pk,” Badar tells Muzamil. “They knew it was not a random email. It was the official government talking to them.” Three months later, Pakistan’s first B2B portal was live. The year was 2002.

Two years after that, leadership at SMEDA changed. The new view, Badar says, was blunt: Pakistan is not digital, SMEs are not digital, shut it all down and bring back the typewriters. “And unfortunately that actually happened.” Muzamil draws the broader line — the post-9/11 collapse that Philippines and India climbed out of and Pakistan did not — and Badar does not soften it.

Nine years at Google, and a country that mapped itself

Badar’s next stops were ASUS, where the Taiwanese-Pakistan-China visa arrangement meant he stopped over in Thailand on every trip, and then Google. He applied on 28 August 2005 on a friend’s forwarding. The first call came the next morning. The interviews ran six to eight weeks. Then the contract was issued in error before a background check had been done — and the background check took nine months. He was already a Googler, contractually, with nothing to do.

It was in those nine waiting months that he and two friends, Aamir and Zeeshan, decided that whatever job came next, they should also have something of their own. They named it Bramerz, kept their day jobs, and bootstrapped the company until it could pay their salaries. Badar would not return full-time until December 2014.

Inside Google he was the first country consultant for Pakistan — not someone parachuted from another market, but the first person to hold the seat. He hosted Google’s chairman in Pakistan. He pushed Google products into the country: Android, Chrome, Google Maps. And it is on Maps that he tells Muzamil one of the best stories in the conversation.

When Google Maps launched, Pakistani regulations did not allow companies to draw maps. Google’s answer was a tool called Map Maker. “Companies don’t do it, individuals can,” Badar paraphrases. He ran mapping parties at FAST Lahore and then at universities across the country. Volunteers began tracing streets, one-ways, highways, waterways. One super-mapper, a retired Air Force pilot named Nazar Hayat Khan, mapped every waterway in Pakistan by hand. Another contributor logged a hundred thousand edits on his own.

The result: Pakistan is one of the world’s best-mapped countries by user-generated content. The maps are bilingual, in English and Urdu, because the people who made them wrote them that way. And the best-mapped city, Badar tells a surprised Muzamil, is not Karachi or Lahore or Islamabad. It is Faisalabad. “Digital democratised it,” he says. “Same phone, same everything is there for them too.” Every Uber and Careem ride in Pakistan today rides on that foundation.

Servicing scales with headcount. Products scale with team.

When Badar returned to Bramerz full-time in late 2014, it had grown from zero to fifty employees. By the time of this conversation it is at a hundred. Muzamil asks him to walk through what the company actually does, and Badar uses the question to make a sharper point about how services businesses work.

“In servicing, if one team member can serve four customers, you need another team member for the next four,” he says. Scale the service, scale the team, and quality of service becomes harder to defend. Build a product instead and the same fifty people can keep improving it for a growing user base. Servicing is also fragile to staff movement and technology shifts. Products give you loyal customers and recurring revenue.

Bramerz now runs three streams. A full-service digital agency. A content management system for newspapers and TV channels, where Bramerz takes the technology headache off newsrooms that are not digital-native — handling traffic spikes, hosting, monetisation — so the publisher can stay focused on the content. And then the product Badar says is closest to his heart right now: Fishry, an e-commerce platform.

Where Fishry sits, and why Muzamil pays attention

Muzamil’s questioning on Fishry is the most personal stretch of the episode. He explains that his wife ran a planner brand on Shopify for years and that he, with a computer science background and a digital media company, found half the integrations a nightmare. Facebook pixel integration sent him in circles. The Instagram store was not available in Pakistan. Most of what they sold, they sold through influencer marketing — his own audience — rather than through paid media, because he did not have the time to learn the platform end to end.

Badar’s pitch to that exact problem is precise. Fishry is not for box movers — traders who buy a SKU, mark it up, and ship it out. It is for the second B in B and B: brand-conscious SMEs that want to build a name and run the same SKU again and again. The platform sits somewhere between Daraz on the early-stage side and Shopify Plus on the enterprise side. Payment gateways — EasyPaisa, JazzCash, credit cards — are pre-integrated. Logistics partners — TCS, MNP, Call Courier, Blue-X — are pre-integrated. Fulfilment is bundled. New integrations are added for free.

The pricing is the part Muzamil reacts to most strongly. Local enterprise software vendors quote him four or five million rupees upfront. Fishry runs on pay-as-you-grow: up to three lakh rupees of GMV per month with no questions asked, full-featured. “You’ve answered your own question,” Badar tells him. The model is built to not require CapEx from the SME.

Muzamil’s reply is a piece of context that lands harder than it usually does on this show. He talks about importing TCS data integration on Shopify in 2019, where the basic API conversation went from a confused support agent to a developer too complicated to follow. By 2020 it was, he says, one-click on better tooling. Most SME owners, he points out, would not have done what he did. They would have sat copy-pasting names and addresses field by field.

The policy that named e-commerce into existence

About forty minutes in, Muzamil moves Badar to the part of the conversation he most wants on record: the National e-Commerce Policy. Badar starts with a sentence that does more work than it should need to. “E-commerce did not exist in Pakistan’s legislation or law. Commerce existed. E-commerce did not.” Until the policy was drafted, there was nothing in the legal framework that could be improved or extended because the category itself was not defined.

The policy named nine pillars — payments, taxation, global connectivity, logistics, consumer protection among them — and identified three focus groups: SMEs, youth, and women entrepreneurs. Cabinet approved it. E-commerce was placed under the Ministry of Commerce. Then the council ran consultations with more than 250 stakeholders — payments, logistics, merchants, platforms — and consolidated more than five hundred recommendations.

One small example Badar singles out is freelancers. The State Bank had a limit: anything above five thousand dollars in inward remittance pushed you out of the home remittance category and into heavier documentation. The result was predictable. Freelancers earning six, ten thousand dollars kept the excess parked offshore with the buyer. The policy corrected for that.

Amazon, small packets, and the factory mindset

The Amazon seller listing for Pakistan is the policy win most people on social media talked about. Badar’s view is more cautious. Existing factories, he tells Muzamil, are addicted to B2B. “Send the whole container, then forget about it,” he says. They do not want to do customer service, they do not want to answer questions, they do not pack well, they do not build brand. So Amazon ends up making more noise than result.

Muzamil walks through the parallel Pakistan Post episode — the postal service launched a high-profile small-packet service that, he says diplomatically, did not turn out to be the right news, with items going missing and primitive systems. The fallback to international logistics players means the revenue leaves the country. Badar confirms that the policy has, as one of its first moves, initiated Pakistan Post’s digital transformation. The physical network is strong. The skills and tools are not. The process, he warns, will be slow because government procurement rules are what they are.

Muzamil’s frustration with the factories is direct, and Badar matches it. “We can solve policies. We cannot change the mindset of the factories,” Badar says. “They are push-oriented. They want production-oriented: take what I make, or get lost. The world has moved to pull. Demand-based. The customer says what they want, I make it accordingly.” He notes that the next generation in those factory-owning families understands this better, but culture in Pakistan does not let them push the change up to their parents and uncles in leadership. He does point to the layer of two-hundred to five-hundred Pakistani brands — Khaadi, Outfitters and others — that have built quality and supply chain at scale. The rest, he says, could be brands but have not arrived.

He closes the segment with a comparison Muzamil does not push back on. Singapore: five million people, $373 billion in exports. Pakistan: 220 million people, twenty-two to twenty-four billion in exports. The productivity per capita gap is the gap.

The $4 billion number, and why cash still wins

For the size of the market, Badar quotes a recent joint study by P@SHA and the Chain Store Association of Pakistan. State Bank documents only the ten percent of e-commerce that runs through online payments. Ninety percent is cash on delivery and therefore not in the data. Extrapolate from the documented ten percent and the last four quarters of domestic e-commerce in Pakistan come to about four billion dollars. The number excludes Pakistani websites that route through foreign payment gateways, which the country cannot see.

On payments, Badar is honest about how stuck the country is. Twenty percent of Pakistanis cannot make digital payments at all. The mobile wallets — Easypaisa, JazzCash — are growing but not at the pace they should. The reason is structural. Cash, handed forward one note at a time, stays as cash. A digital transaction takes a deduction at every hop, and once tax is applied at each stage the marginal advantage of going digital almost disappears. “Digital payments are not incentivised enough for people to leave cash,” he says.

Beneath that sits a deeper trust problem. People who are not yet on digital payments fear that the day they begin transacting on bank rails is the day the tax authority arrives. “We do not facilitate tax in Pakistan, rather I would say we harass,” Badar says. The twenty-five to thirty lakh people already paying tax get notice on notice on notice. The remaining population watches and stays on cash. The fix, he argues, is not to widen the tax net by force. It is to facilitate, to show value, to make the encounter survivable.

And then there is the banks themselves. Traditional Pakistani banks, with all due respect, treat consumer banking as a side activity. Their bread and butter comes from government treasury and other lines. That is why, Badar says, the payment gateway you ask them for does not get an email back. The newer fintechs and aggregators have a different incentive structure — for them, consumer servicing is the business — and that is where he expects the next wave of improvement to come from.

IT exports, 47% growth, and the ten percent that can be hired

Muzamil pivots in the final stretch to the IT industry and the noise around the ten billion dollar export target. Badar opens with the recent number: IT exports grew by close to 47% last year, from $1.2 billion to $2.1 billion. Some of that is COVID. Some of it is rising global demand. None of it is sustainable without inputs.

“Mind share is the input,” Badar says. “You need skilled teams, members, staff, engineers.” Pakistan graduates twenty-five to thirty-five thousand computer science and engineering students a year. His estimate of how many of them are employable as-is is ten percent. Ninety percent need retraining — and whether the company does it, or a partner does it, or the graduate funds it themselves, somebody has to.

Muzamil presses on a point that has been bothering him. Why is the private sector not doing more itself? Why no consortium, no vocational network, no industry-funded training pipeline? “We always look at the handout,” he says. Badar acknowledges it and points to where work has started. Member companies have begun running their own learning and development functions, conducting bulk testing across universities and — in some cases — publishing anonymised results so the universities can see where their graduates rank. The missing link, he says, is faculty. The curriculum is outdated and the faculty needs retraining and capacity building before it can teach new skills. Industry people will have to come in and teach, even at a fraction of what they earn in their day jobs.

The number he leaves Muzamil with is the one to remember. An extra one hundred thousand employable graduates, Badar estimates, would translate into two to three billion dollars of additional IT export. Output is proportional to input. The country is not short on demand. It is short on people it can hire.

”Sirf basics theek kar lein”

Muzamil closes with the question he asks every guest. Thirty years from now, when Badar is seventy-five, what kind of Pakistan does he see? Badar’s answer is not a technology answer. He talks about lanes. About not wasting water washing the car. About civic sense, basic humanity, basic ethics, basic culture. “I’m not talking about technology at all,” he tells Muzamil. “Just fix the basics.”

He extends it to skills. The information is no longer scarce. YouTube is there. Tools are there. The internet is there. The only thing left to acquire is the skill itself. Study, yes — but acquire skills alongside it so that you can contribute to the economy. Do not look for shortcuts. Work month by month, year by year. If you make a mistake, say sorry and try again. The result, he says, will follow the effort. By the end of the conversation, the policy architect and the platform builder is making a case that sounds almost old-fashioned, and is probably the truest thing in the episode.