The Pakistani who fixed a broken denim factory in Mexico

A family that has been in textile for 150 years

The episode opens with Muzamil explaining why he invited this particular guest. Pakistan’s economy is under pressure, he says, and he has become personally interested in export industries. What drew him to A. Rauf Razzak Ganatra was not just the family’s deep textile roots but the fact that Ganatra is currently working in Mexico — a destination Muzamil had never heard of in the context of Pakistani textile talent.

Ganatra was born in Karachi in 1965, eight months after his father had already left for Germany to study engineering. His family belongs to the Meman community, originally cotton growers and processors in Gujarat and Surat who migrated to Pakistan in 1947. The migration was not primarily economic. “Bahut bada jazba tha naye Pakistan ke liye,” Ganatra says — there was enormous enthusiasm for the new country, and the Memans, alongside families like the Dawoods, Adamjees, and Gul Ahmads, came as a collective act of nation-building. His grandfather, Latif Ibrahim Jamal, was among the largest industrialists of early Pakistan and is still remembered in Karachi through the institutions he endowed.

The family started textile in 1952 — spinning, weaving, finishing, printing — and brought Japanese and English technicians to set up the machinery. By the time Ganatra was fourteen, he was working as a translator between a Dutch erector installing a twelve-colour printing machine from Holland and Urdu-speaking workers who could not communicate with him. “Woh ek bache ke liye jo chaudah hai, inspiration hota hai,” he says. That machine, and the moment a plain piece of cloth emerged from it printed in twelve colours, gave him a curiosity about manufacturing processes that never left him.

What nationalization actually did to industrial families

Muzamil presses Ganatra on a question that runs through many conversations with Pakistan’s old industrial families: they built something extraordinary from nothing after partition, and then somehow stopped diversifying. Before 1971 the family was in textile, sugar, and steel. After 1971 they were essentially only in textile. Why?

Ganatra’s answer is specific. The 1971 war cost the family its steel mill in Chittagong and its sugar mill in Jarranwala — both nationalised. “Main samjha ke pata nahi kya ho gaya, chota sa bacha tha, chhe saal.” He was six years old and remembers his grandfather crying. What happened next, he says, is the inside story that explains the next fifty years. The industrialists moved their personal capital offshore and then funded their remaining industry entirely through bank loans. The logic was defensive: if the state could seize assets once, it could do so again. “Woh ek basically ek risk aversion aa gayi uske baad.”

That risk aversion, Ganatra argues, is the structural reason Pakistan’s industrial families did not diversify after 1971. They were not lazy or unimaginative. They were operating under a trauma that made capital preservation the dominant instinct. The collective memory of having built an empire from scratch, lost it to partition, rebuilt it, and then lost parts of it again to nationalisation produced a generation that would not bet the house a third time.

The Meman succession problem

Later in the discussion, Muzamil raises something he says he pushes back on with many Meman friends: the community’s succession model. The pattern he describes is consistent — a patriarch builds a business, his sons each receive a factory, and each son then tries to grow his factory independently rather than pooling decision-making power. The result is a permanently decentralised market of small nodes competing with each other.

“Punjab seekh gaya,” Muzamil says. Punjab’s industrial families, he argues, eventually adopted more corporate structures, went public, built brands, and diversified. Karachi’s Meman families, by contrast, tend to “relish past glory” without converting it into actionable growth.

Ganatra agrees with the diagnosis but adds a layer. “Har ek ka thought process itna fast hai. Har koi kehta hai meri baat mani jaye, meri baat suni jaye.” Every individual in a Meman family thinks fast and wants to lead, which makes collective governance structurally difficult. He acknowledges his own case: he left the family business after twelve years, then left Brunenza after ten, then Soorty after two, then Sapphire after four. “Maybe that’s the process.” The curiosity that makes Memans effective entrepreneurs also makes them poor board members.

He notes that IPOs and public listings were never culturally popular in Karachi despite it being Pakistan’s financial capital, whereas Interloop — a Faisalabad company — became a large global entity precisely by building institutional structures rather than family fiefdoms.

Building Biz Incorporated and bringing Levi’s to Pakistan

Ganatra spent twelve years inside Hussain Industries, the family business, learning every process from the loom upward. “Aap mujhe aaj kahein ke aap loom chalakar de do, main aapko loom chala dunga.” He can stitch a complete trouser, operate a spinning machine, and repair a loom. That grounding gave him the confidence to leave in 2000 and co-found Biz Incorporated from scratch with the son of a prominent business family who had returned from Canada.

The project started with no customers. Within two years they brought Levi’s into Pakistan as a production partner. They also made bedsheets and garments for export. Ganatra describes the period as a genuine startup before the word startup existed in Pakistan. “Hum nahi jaante the naam startup us waqt. That was in 2000.”

He stayed with Biz Incorporated for ten years, stabilising partly because he had married into a Syed family, had four sons, and felt the obligation of stability. A fire at the plant caused significant losses and eventually he moved on — first to Soorty for a two-year project, then to Sapphire, where he worked on knitted denim: taking denim yarn, dyeing it, forming cones, and running it through knitting machines to produce a fabric that stretches. The commercial logic was comfort. “Pandemic mein aapne dekha hoga, everybody is wearing pajamas. Why? Because they are flexible.”

He also made a point that surprised Muzamil: denim, as conventionally woven, is not good for health. The chemicals used in denim production are absorbed through skin. “Denim is not good for health. Lot of chemicals in denims are not — so whenever you wear denim, always try to cover yourself inside.”

Eight million metres a month in Mexico

Muzamil asks how Mexico happened. Ganatra’s first reaction, he admits, was to associate Mexico only with narco culture and Western films. “Adios, and that’s it.” A chemical supplier mentioned a plant there that needed restructuring. They sent him a free ticket.

What he found was a plant in very bad shape — but a company of significant scale. “They are producing 8,000,000 metres per month at that plant. Multiply by three dollars per metre — that is 24,000,000 per month.” The company’s total size was 2.3 billion dollars. The hiring process ran to eight interviews across a recruiting agency, internal interviewers, and American-style competency assessments. Candidates came from Turkey, England, and Spain. Ganatra was selected.

“Pakistan ke liye privilege hai ke ek aise Pakistani ko chuna gaya.” He notes there was no bias — no discrimination on the basis of religion, appearance, or nationality. “Merit ka — aapne saare boxes tick kiye, to you are the person.”

The cultural adjustment was significant. His boss calls him by his first name. He calls his boss by his first name. His workers call him by his first name. “Woh ek cultural shock tha.” He contrasts this with what he calls the “sethi culture” in Karachi, where a manager is expected to do everything including driving workers home if the driver is absent, and where commitment is measured by being available at three in the morning. In Mexico, he says, the work ethic is different but the output is comparable — and the hierarchy is flat enough that decisions move faster.

He also observed something that stayed with him. During a difficult moment, a local worker offered him a cactus fruit — a tuna — and explained that you cannot control when the cactus produces fruit. You wait, you harvest, you eat. “Woh ek life changing statement tha mere liye.” The patience embedded in that metaphor was something he had not encountered in Pakistan’s industrial culture.

Pakistan exports raw value, not finished wealth

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil and Ganatra arrive at the central economic argument. Pakistan produces cotton, spins yarn, and sells fabric. Bangladesh buys that yarn, makes garments, and exports them at higher value. “Value addition to garment mein hi ho gayi.” Pakistan blames Bangladesh for surpassing it in textile exports while continuing to supply Bangladesh with the inputs it needs to do so.

The same logic applies to finished goods. A T-shirt made in Pakistan and sold in Dubai carries a price that reflects the manufacturer’s seven or eight dollars per unit. The brand selling it in the West earns two hundred. “Bees dollar jeans ke deta hai, do sau ke bechta hai.” Mexico, Ganatra says, has moved to premium positioning. “Premium par chale gaye.”

He estimates that fifty to sixty percent of Pakistan’s textile export revenue immediately leaves the country in the form of imported inputs — zippers, chemicals, machinery. “Unless ke aap yahan local production shuru karein.” He argues that Pakistan needs to deregulate trade bodies, remove political appointees from chambers of commerce, and let industry govern itself. “Chambers of commerce rubber stamps ban gayi hain. Saare political log baithe hue.”

Muzamil asks Ganatra how he sees Pakistan in 2050. “Very bright future,” Ganatra says, “but agar kuch karenge to.” The condition is not external. “Aapne khud change hona hai. Maine khud change hona hai.” He adds that Pakistan’s demographic scale — millions of young people entering the workforce every year — is an asset only if it is trained and deployed, not simply counted. “Hum toh bahut badi production kar rahe hain, isko utilize karein.”