Why Ronin's founder bet on a Pakistan-built consumer brand

A CA dropout who could not sit still

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing his guest as someone he had only recently learned about — through an episode by Irfan Junejo and Junaid that visited the factory floor. The numbers got his attention: more than six million devices produced in Pakistan every year, and roughly a 60% share of the country’s consumer-electronics segment. The guest is Jahangir Munawar, founder and CEO of Ronin.

Jahangir’s first move is to dismantle the founder mythology that usually opens these conversations. He is, by his own description, a CA dropout. The plan, set largely by his family, was a chartered accountancy qualification followed by a respectable job. While he was studying, he started helping at his father’s mobile-phone shop part-time. What he saw there was a business being run conventionally, with obvious gaps. He identified the gaps, filled them, and watched margins and growth improve. That was the moment the plan changed. “Mujhe hamesha lagta tha ke sky is the limit,” he tells Muzamil. “I could do anything. I just needed someone to give me the chance.”

He went through five or six different businesses before anything stuck. A stint in the Jodia Bazaar wholesale market. A stock-market run, funded by his mother selling her gold bangles, that ended when the Benazir Bhutto assassination crashed the market and wiped out the investment. None of it dented the underlying conviction.

The trip to China that taught him to bootstrap on principle

Later in the discussion, Jahangir describes the period that, in his own telling, made him into an operator rather than just an entrepreneur. He was sent to China on a sourcing trip with limited capital and a long list of doubts from his father and the bank. How would they offer credit when the business ran on cash? How would they honour warranty claims without being flooded with returns? Would unfamiliar product categories even sell?

What he does not share publicly until this conversation is what the trip actually looked like. “The room I lived in was about the size of a washroom,” he says. He ate one meal a day instead of three so the capital would stretch. He was in the market from morning until night for the full twenty-five days. He came back having proved the model in three months — credit, warranty, and all.

That experience hardened a view he returns to throughout the conversation: marketing is downstream of product. “A marketer, no matter how good, can sell your product once,” he tells Muzamil. “The second time, the product itself has to have life in it. Otherwise nothing moves.” From 2016 onwards — when Ronin was founded — every rupee of incremental investment went into product quality, not into ad budgets.

Why Ronin exists at all

The trigger for Ronin came on a separate trip, this one to the United States in roughly 2016. Jahangir spent two months looking at how the American consumer-electronics shelf was organised. Multiple brands, real quality, genuine choice. Then he came home and looked at the Pakistani shelf. Variety existed, but everything on it was cheap and low-quality. There was no brand a Pakistani consumer could reach for and trust.

That is the gap Ronin was built to close. Initially the products were sourced from China and rebranded — and Jahangir is candid that the early Chinese supply chain came with its own problems. “If the product said 30,000 mAh on the label, you would actually get ten thousand inside. Sometimes five.” Demand was strong, but supply was unreliable, and Jahangir realised the brand could only ever be as good as somebody else’s factory. That dependence is what eventually pushed him into manufacturing in Pakistan.

The name itself is deliberate. Ronin is a Japanese term for a warrior with no master — independent, not bound by convention. Jahangir liked the framing because it described how he wanted to operate. “Hum bhi aise hi the,” he says. “Conventional cheezon ko question karne wale.”

Building the factory — and changing how a production floor treats people

When Muzamil asks what it actually took to build a Pakistani factory from scratch, Jahangir does not lead with machinery or capital. He leads with the production manager.

The first manager Ronin hired came out of conventional Pakistani manufacturing and treated the workers the way he had been taught to treat workers. “It did not look like he was dealing with human beings,” Jahangir says. He replaced that approach with a simple rule: the workers are people, and they are treated the way the company treats its partners.

The output, he argues, speaks for itself. Three separate Chinese delegations visited the factory in the two months before this recording. They were not, Jahangir says, polite. “They were literally shocked. They said they are going to replicate our quality checks, our environment, and our culture in China.” For a Pakistani consumer-electronics founder to describe Chinese visitors as students rather than teachers is, in this conversation, the headline moment.

The operational lessons that sit underneath it are simpler than the founder mythology suggests. Workers are easy to hire in Pakistan. Most of the raw resources are locally available; only certain inputs still come from China. Suppliers were the early bottleneck, but as the local industry has matured, that gap has narrowed. The blocker is rarely capability. “The day you start seeing workers as people like yourself,” Jahangir tells Muzamil, “their output starts coming out at full capacity.”

What “made in Pakistan” actually means at Ronin today

Ronin runs more than 150 SKUs, with most volume in audio. During the recording, Jahangir shows Muzamil a smartwatch that has not yet launched, assembled in Pakistan. He is precise about the language. Assembly, today, means components are imported and assembled, tested, and quality-checked locally. Manufacturing is the longer arc — and Ronin is already moving up it. PCB design, he confirms, is now being done in-house. “We will dictate to China what kind of PCB we want,” he says. “We will not take dictation from them.”

The factory runs eighteen-hour shifts and produces more than six million devices a year. Warranty is offered on the products — something Jahangir claims Ronin helped introduce to the Pakistani consumer-electronics category — and the warranty exists precisely because the product is built to honour it, not as a marketing prop.

Muzamil pushes on the competitive logic. Smartwatches are not stationery. The category is genuinely contested between Shenzhen, Silicon Valley, and a hundred other brands worldwide. Why pick the hardest version of the fight? Jahangir’s answer is short. “I believe we are capable enough. If you ask me to build a rocket, I will build it. The question is mindset.” He concedes one external constraint, however — that Pakistan’s government does not yet extend the kind of structural support that neighbouring countries offer their local industries. That, he says, is the only real flow.

The case for doubling down on Pakistan

The middle of the conversation turns to the question Muzamil keeps coming back to in his economic episodes: why stay? The last few years in Pakistan have included a near-default narrative, currency stress, and a steady drumbeat of industries either shutting down or shifting operations abroad.

Jahangir does not flinch on the answer. “Even when the whole world was saying Pakistan is about to default, we were running aggressively. We were not minimising.” He sees the next phase clearly. With tariffs intensifying on China, distribution-ship approaches from other countries have already been arriving for the last two to three years. Ronin’s policy has been to serve the Pakistani market fully first, and then move toward export. That moment, he tells Muzamil, is now close. The brand’s stated objective is global recognition of Pakistan in the tech-product category.

He is sharp about the moral framing too. People have told him to move the business out. His reply: “If my vision is to make Pakistan dominate globally, what would I achieve by leaving Pakistan to do it?” He recounts conversations with Pakistanis in their fifties and sixties in the US who, when he asked them honestly how their lives had turned out, told him with tears that they regretted the move. Their children, raised abroad, had no intention of coming back. “Pakistan se behtar mulk Pakistanion ke liye koi nahi hai,” he says — there is no better country for Pakistanis than Pakistan.

Employee benefits as operating philosophy, not gimmick

Muzamil pushes Jahangir on Ronin’s employee-benefits programme, which he had heard was unusually extensive for a Pakistani manufacturing operation. The standard pushback in local industry is that workers are not ready for benefits — give them an inch and they take a mile. Jahangir’s response is built on what he calls a “win-win philosophy.”

His argument is structural. A long-term relationship — with an employee, a supplier, a distributor, or a consumer — only holds if both sides benefit. If the organisation grows but the employee does not come along, the relationship has no future. He also makes a quieter point about what most professional lives actually look like. After education, a person enters the workforce, starts balancing work and family, and slowly loses contact with the passions and hobbies that made them who they were. Ronin’s benefits exist, he says, so that an employee can hold on to those things while still doing the job.

The reported result is retention. By his count, fewer than five solid-reason departures across his organisation’s history — versus the fifty or so a comparable operation might see. “These employees are our partners and our asset,” he tells Muzamil. “The longer they stay, the easier our mission becomes.”

The talent question — and what universities need to add

Muzamil raises the standard critique of Pakistan’s labour market: that the country has human capital but not talent, because the education system does not produce employability. Jahangir broadly agrees, with one important nuance. For factory-floor workers, he sets a minimum baseline of matric — partly so they can grow into officer-level roles over time. He explicitly notes that Ronin also hires below that bar, including workers who completed only class six or eight, because he believes the company has a responsibility to contribute to society to the limit of what it can absorb.

On universities, his diagnosis has two parts. The first is practical exposure. Graduates have read the theory, but they cannot relate it to practice. They have not seen the thing the textbook is describing. The second is vision. “If you do not know where you have to reach,” he says, “you will not put in the effort to reach it.” Add practical exposure and vision-setting to a Pakistani university degree, and the country’s talent gap shrinks dramatically.

Muzamil offers the standard counter from the university side: industry has to open the door. He suggests a model in which a company like Ronin tells a university which research areas matter to it, supervises final-year projects externally, and absorbs the output. Jahangir agrees immediately. “It is a win for us, and it is a win for them. Any time it is win-win, it works.”

Gen Z, respect, and the one-and-a-half-year rule

Muzamil closes the substantive arc of the conversation on the generational question. Gen Z employees are widely described as harder to manage — distracted, short-termist, attached to mental-health framings their elders did not use. Jahangir does not dismiss the framing, but he reframes the management problem. Previous generations, he says, came in for the package and the pay. Gen Z employees come in for respect, environment, and the opportunity to prove themselves. Organisations that give them open ground get the capability that is genuinely there.

He has one piece of advice for the employees themselves. Quitting at two or six months — a pattern he sees regularly — produces no learning. The honest minimum, in his view, is a year to a year and a half in a first role. That window is what allows both the organisation and the employee to compound something out of the relationship.

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil names the larger point explicitly. The reason to tell Ronin’s story is not Ronin. It is so that ten more founders, in ten more categories, do what Jahangir has done. He marks the timeline — fifteen years of journey, ten years of the brand, a 2018 IMF cycle, COVID in 2020, another economic crisis in 2022 — and notes that the business has held through all of it. That is the point of the episode.