Thought Behind Things · Ep 288 · Nov 28, 2022 · 1:55:00
Abdul Razak Dawood: a Memon village, Columbia, and building DESCON
Abdul Razak Dawood traces a life from a Memon village with no electricity to Columbia, the Lawrencepur mill, the loss of East Pakistan, and the founding of DESCON, then explains his bet on Africa, exports, and sports.
with Abdul Razak Dawood
19 min read
A village with no electricity, and a family that kept starting over
The conversation opens with Muzamil framing the guest carefully: the founder of DESCON, a man from the well-known Dawood family, with a long focus on exports and a particular interest in Africa. What follows is less a business interview than a memory of nearly the entire arc of Pakistani industry, told by someone who lived through it.
Abdul Razak Dawood begins at the beginning. He was born in a very small village in Kathiawar, in what is today Gujarat, India. No electricity, no running water, nothing. The village was a hub of the Memon community, and it ran on a particular rhythm: the men were almost always away trading, so the village itself was made up of older people and children.
The family’s story before partition is not one of uninterrupted success. His grandfather went bankrupt in the crash of 1929 and never recovered before he died. His sons, Abdul Razak’s father and uncles, were left looking for work anywhere in India, mostly in sales. Under the eldest brother, they regrouped, went to Mumbai, and started a cotton-yarn business. From there they built outward: a ginning factory near the village, a ghee factory in Calcutta, a slow climb into industry. Then partition arrived, and everything had to move.
The family packed up for Karachi. His father stayed back a year, through 1948, to sell off the family’s assets in India, a few shops and the Calcutta ghee facility, while Abdul Razak got his first formal schooling in Calcutta. By the end of 1948 they were in Karachi, with no business base there at all. “We had to start from scratch,” he says. They traded the house they had given up in India for a house in Karachi and began again.
The pivotal early decision belonged to his uncle, who told the family: you stay in Pakistan, I am off to London. He saw a new country being born and went to Manchester to supply textiles into a Pakistan starved of yarn and cloth. Soon after, the elders made a second decision that would shape Abdul Razak’s life. Eight of the family’s boys were sent to England. Five of them stayed on at a single rugged English public school out in Yorkshire.
The bus, the flash, and a switch that never flipped back
Abdul Razak is candid that he was not, at first, a student. He was a sportsman, rugby and cricket and anything with a ball, and he paid no attention to academics at all. The result was that he failed his O-levels and had to repeat them. It did not bother him in the slightest. He was a sportsman.
Then came one of the strangest and most specific stories in the conversation. He was on a bus coming home from school, his cousin beside him, when he looked out the window and saw what he describes as a flash, like lightning, on a clear evening at Maghrib time. His cousin saw nothing and told him he was dreaming. Abdul Razak turned to him and said: from now on I am going to work, I am going to study, I am going to start my life differently. “And that was it.” He dates it to September 1961, when he was about seventeen. The switch flipped from sports to academics and, by his account, never flipped back.
He passed his O-levels and A-levels, went to university, and studied mining engineering at Newcastle. The choice of mining was almost an accident of policy. In those days the State Bank had to approve remitting money abroad, and it would only fund study in fields not already available inside Pakistan, such as metallurgy, mining, and chemical engineering. Mechanical or civil, both available at home, would not be funded. So he did mining. He had no idea at the time how useful an engineering grounding would later prove. It is a theme he returns to throughout: that things are stored up in a life and only make sense in retrospect.
Columbia, and learning what hard work actually was
The transformation he keeps coming back to is America. He went to Columbia University in New York for his MBA, and he says plainly that it changed his life. It was the late 1960s, and New York was raw. Harlem was far rougher than today, the Vietnam War was on, students were in the streets. He was on campus for the famous Columbia strike of 1968. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy had been assassinated. The civil rights movement was unfolding on television. “The 50s America was peaceful,” he says. “The 60s America was volatile.”
There were almost no Pakistanis around him. He was one of a tiny first wave: a cousin at Harvard, another at Northwestern, others starting to reach Berkeley. But the thing that marked him most was not the politics. It was the work. “I never realized what hard work was until I went to America,” he says, and not even England had prepared him for it.
He tells it through one image. At registration the university handed him a sealed envelope marked “do not open until you have registered.” He took it back to his room, threw it on the bed, assumed it was American propaganda, and finally opened it: it was the assignment for the first day of class. He skimmed it, walked in, and watched the professor pull a card from a deck, call a name, and launch straight into the business issues of a real company. It shook him. When he asked the librarian what time the library closed, she told him it never did. Open all night, come whenever you want. At midnight people were out jogging. “It’s a different world,” he says. “It’s always awake.” And the surprising part of his telling is that he loved it. Being active, being busy all the time: that, he decided, was the life he wanted.
Coming home to a country turning against the 22 families
While the boys were away, the family business in Pakistan had grown into something large. His uncle, whom he describes as relentlessly aggressive and able to “smell an opportunity a mile away,” pushed the family from textiles into a far broader base: cotton mills, paper, a fertilizer plant under construction, a viscose rayon unit, chemicals, jute, shipping. This was, in Abdul Razak’s telling, the real decade when Pakistani industry grew, with families like his moving from the primary world of textiles into secondary chemicals and refining.
He came back in 1968 to a country that had begun to turn on those families. The anti-Ayub movement was starting. The economist Mahbub ul Haq had made the famous statement that 22 families controlled the bulk of Pakistani business, and those families became a political target. His was, he acknowledges, among the top few. So he arrived into the flap.
His father wanted him to work in Karachi, under him, in the new air-conditioned building. Abdul Razak was horrified and refused on both counts. The argument went on for weeks until he found the words that ended it: “Father, why don’t you allow me to find my place in the sun? I will never grow if I am under your shadow. You’re too big a man, I’m too small.” His father relented and asked where he wanted to go. Anywhere, he said. They sent him to the family’s Lawrencepur woolen textile mill in District Attock, and within months he had fallen in love with it. By twenty-five or twenty-six he was its managing director.
He admits he arrived knowing nothing about making cloth or yarn. His first meeting with the mill’s managers was a promise rather than a plan: I know nothing about how to make a cloth, but I will work hard and I will learn, and I can bring you what I learned at Columbia, on marketing and production methods. It became, he says, a lovely interaction and a great experience, partly because the outside world made it hard. Labor militancy, left-wing and socialist in flavor, had reached the mill, strike after strike under a strong union that he believes was being instigated by an outsider. It took him about a year to ease that outsider out and build a good relationship with the union.
What is striking is the position he took when a government commission asked whether workers should have the right to strike. Many of his business friends said no. He said yes. He had read the labor laws and concluded they were heavily loaded in favor of management, and that without the real threat of a strike there was no balance. Management, he argued, must know it can get hurt too. The newer industrial relations ordinance restored the right to strike, and he felt that strongly even though his own mill had suffered for it. Lawrencepur also let him finally apply the marketing he had learned at Columbia, launching new products and ladies’ fabrics into segments of a local market that, he felt, did not yet understand market segmentation.
1971, nationalization, and the draining of “business DNA”
He had barely reached calm, in early 1971, when the year turned dramatic. When East Pakistan broke, the family’s large units there became a focus of the crisis. They got their family people out, but the units themselves, the paper mills and the rayon and chemical operations, were taken over by the new Bangladesh government and classified as enemy property. No compensation, from Dhaka or from Islamabad. Nothing.
Then, as the family was still licking its wounds, Bhutto nationalized industry in West Pakistan. “Oh my God,” he remembers thinking, “so all of a sudden we just shrank.” Family members who had each been running different units suddenly had nothing to run. They were given bonds they could only sell at a steep discount, nowhere near what had been taken. The fertilizer plant survived largely because it carried foreign investment. Banks, flour mills, rice mills, and ginning factories followed into state hands.
The loss he lingers on, though, is human, not financial. With the squeeze, family members began emigrating to Canada and America. “We lost a lot of our business DNA,” he says. That, to him, was the major loss.
For Abdul Razak personally, the turn came in 1972, when his uncle asked him to move to Lahore to fix a dispute with the family’s American partner, Hercules, in the urea fertilizer plant that had just come on stream, the business that would become Dawood Hercules. Leaving Lawrencepur was, he says, a very sad day. But the new job stretched him in a completely different direction. Instead of labor and a rural mill, he now spent ninety percent of his time on international partner relationships, corporate issues, and the kind of agreements he had never had to read before. Solving the partnership took over a year, after which he became managing director and spent eight years there. His engineering instincts came alive: process engineering, drawings, materials, construction, maintenance. He did not realize it then, but he was being prepared for what came next.
DESCON: four engineers, one room, and a deliberate gap in the market
By 1977, fault lines were widening inside the family, and people were advising him to get ready for the break. He did. When the family split and he left Dawood Hercules, his father asked what he would do. He said engineering. He started DESCON with four engineers from Dawood Hercules: five men in a room about the size of the studio.
The strategic insight was simple and clear-eyed. In Pakistan at the time, civil engineering was already developed, with reasonable companies in the field. Mechanical and electrical engineering had no organized player, only one-man shows. “I said, this is an opportunity. Why should I compete with civil? Let me go into mechanical.” DESCON began erecting plants from clients’ own drawings, a sugar mill, a small refinery, and work started coming in precisely because there was no proper organized mechanical company.
The job that put DESCON on the map was the National Refinery expansion in Karachi in 1981. Many people warned him it was too big, that he should take a small slice and not risk falling flat. He refused: “I’ve got the energy, I can do it.” DESCON took the mechanical scope, won it, and the three-year project gave the young company both cash flow and a name.
Then he made the move that defined the company. In 1981 he gathered his senior managers, told them to run the refinery job, and announced that Pakistan was too small: DESCON had to go global. He spent his time shuttling between Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia, and in 1982 won the company’s first international job through one of the more memorable scenes in the conversation. DESCON had bid thirty percent below everyone else. The Arab client was baffled, telling him he had surely come to withdraw the bid. No, Abdul Razak said, I have come to ask you to give it to us. Will you make money? No. You’re sure you want it? Yes. He won it, did a good job, and broke even, and was then pre-qualified for all the client’s future work. “I was just buying my admission ticket,” he says. “I don’t care about making money on the first job. I want to settle down here.” That was thirty years ago, and DESCON is still there.
The company kept climbing the value chain: from mechanical to a one-stop shop offering civil, mechanical, and electrical, then into full EPC, engineering, procurement, and construction, where you make the drawings rather than just execute them. He tells the EPC origin story against himself. Unilever asked DESCON to build a hydrogen plant on a turnkey basis. His engineers said they could do it, and they did. But, terrified of damaging the company’s reputation, they specified the very best of everything. “We gave Unilever a Cadillac and charged the price of a Suzuki for it. We lost our shirt on it.” The plant is still running, beautifully over-designed, and the lesson was bitter but formative. Today DESCON operates across Oman, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, with a recent acquisition in South Africa, a facility built by engineers who had grown old with their own company and wanted to sell.
Handing it over in 24 hours
Abdul Razak makes a point of pausing on what he calls the biggest problem in any family business: the transition of power from one generation to the next. For him, circumstance handled it cleanly. When Imran Khan asked him to join the government and he finally said yes, he called the entire company together and announced that at seven o’clock that evening he would walk out of the gates and not come back. He signed over everything to his two sons and the management in a single meeting. Succession, de facto, in 24 hours.
He kept his word. He did not re-enter the premises until after Imran Khan’s government was voted out, and even then he did not reclaim his old seat. He is not chairman of any of the companies, not on their boards, does not attend strategic meetings. He tells his sons and the management to treat him as a reference library: a library calls no one and summons no one; you come to it if you want advice, and you are free not to. While he was away, his sons diversified the group beyond engineering into agriculture: micronutrients tailored to specific soils, marketing of agricultural products, and a serious research farm. He says only that he wishes he had started those other things earlier.
BARD Foundation: the one thing almost no one funds
Now, he says, he spends none of his energy earning money and all of it spending money. The vehicle is the BARD Foundation, named for Bilkis and Abdullah Razak Dawood. Education is one pillar, fitting for a man who taught on the Punjab University MBA program from 1975 to about 1981, co-founded LUMS with Syed Babar Ali, and remains its pro-chancellor. “There is no better equalizer than education,” he says. “And the other good equalizer is sports.”
That second equalizer is where the foundation does something unusual. Health is crowded with donors; sports is almost empty. So BARD’s charter is simple: any Pakistani, man or woman, with the spirit of adventure and the courage and determination to reach the international level in sport, will be backed. He reels off the stories with obvious delight. Naila Kiani came and asked if the foundation would fund her to climb K2; they did, she did it, and now they are asking her to tour universities so young people see that it can be done. A nine- or ten-year-old tennis player, Rebecca, swept the under-12 tournaments. And then there is Anya, an eleven-year-old who won across Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan, reached a semi-final in Athens against the best young players in the world, and was spotted by IMG, which asked the foundation to guarantee two years of backing while the academy in Florida trained her with a team of coaches for tennis, nutrition, and physical and mental development. The whole family moved with her. Visiting that academy, he says, was mind-blowing: only then do you understand what it takes to compete against the world-class.
He is honest that funding individuals, however thrilling, will not move the needle nationally. So a group of them has spent months designing something bigger: surveying how many football fields actually exist in Karachi and Lahore (he was surprised to find an adequate number, simply lying dormant), and standing up a transparent, open league structure that anyone can join or leave. He would rather build the institution properly than rush it. He and Muzamil spend a long stretch on why Pakistan, so saturated in sport, has failed to turn it into a business the way the PSL finally did for cricket. They agree the country has the talent and the affinity, but not yet the promoters and structures to convert it.
Africa, exports, and the long argument for making things
The last stretch is policy, drawn from his time as Adviser on Commerce, where he says he focused on three things: exports, regional connectivity, and industrial development.
On Africa, his point is scale. The ministry’s own analysis showed Africa is roughly the size of India as a market, about 1.2 billion people, and largely ignored by Pakistani exporters. He took a large business delegation to Kenya, then to Nigeria after COVID, trying to open his own business community’s eyes. With the continent moving toward a single free-trade area, goods could one day ship right across it. On regional connectivity, he describes the grind of building trade and transit agreements with Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Kyrgyzstan, and the TIR protocol that lets a sealed Pakistani truck run from Pakistan to Moscow, or through Iran into Turkey, without being stopped at every border. Karachi, he notes, is the natural port both for Central Asia reaching toward Africa and for Africa reaching toward Central Asia, but the bottlenecks are physical and require serious investment at the borders.
On exports, his frustration is plain. For thirty years, he argues, no government has understood that an export-led growth strategy is the only way forward, because Pakistan simply does not earn enough dollars. When focus did land, in his telling textiles grew sharply and IT grew faster still, it worked. He pushed to strip anti-export taxes off raw materials, and championed the unglamorous machinery of trade: geographical indications, so that Basmati, the Multani tile, and the Peshawari chappal are protected as Pakistani brands (he recalls writing to Ralph Lauren over chappals, only to find Pakistan lacked the laws), and the Madrid protocol, which registers a brand across dozens of countries at once. The deeper diagnosis he and Muzamil land on is about manufacturing itself. A Pakistani car has at most forty to forty-five percent local content; a tractor nearly a hundred, which is why tractors can be exported and cars cannot. He points to China, which lived with a single car model for fifteen years until it understood and could make every part, then designed its own. Pakistan, by contrast, demands variety it has not earned, and has become, he says, a consumption-led economy rather than an export-led one. It is a solvable problem, he insists. It just takes time and persistence across governments, which is exactly what Pakistan tends not to give it.
No regrets, and a country at a crucial stage
Muzamil ends where he often does, but first asks something more personal: given the East Pakistan loss, the nationalization, everything, does he regret coming back to Pakistan? The answer is unequivocal. No regrets at all. When the nationalization hit, seniors offered to move him to Canada; he chose to stay. His brothers went. Years later they sat down and compared: the children on both sides went to American universities, the work got done on both sides, and they concluded that staying in Pakistan had been the right decision. “I believe it. I think it was one of the best decisions I took.”
On Pakistan in 2050, he reaches for history. America in 1865, mid-civil-war with Lincoln assassinated, looked finished and was not. Germany after the First World War, Russia after the revolution, China: all passed through near-despair before becoming strong. Pakistan, he says, is at a very crucial stage, in for a low, rough stretch of the roller coaster, its society perhaps ripped for a time. But the country is only seventy-five years old, “and there’s nothing in the making of a nation” in that. His instruction to himself and his friends is the same one that runs through the whole conversation: keep doing what you are doing, do not stop. It will be difficult and acrimonious and slow, but he has every hope they will get through. Muzamil, who calls it one of the most profound conversations he has had in 300 episodes, lets the optimism stand as the closing note.
Full transcript
[Music] [Applause] thank you welcome back to another episode of thought behind things that is meaning to speak to for a very very long time uh and uh because we just thought okay we'll try our luck um and as fate would have it you know we were able to tie something up to he's the founder of tescon uh he's from the um you know famous dawood family uh Disney Pakistan major uh you know Industries Pakistan overall uh he had a huge focus on exports and was uh you know really looking at Africa and I really want to talk about that because that was a very interesting policy that a lot of other people have missed on the management program interesting area uh thank you so much for being part of the show thank you um we're just trying to understand a little bit about where were you born um and tell me a little bit about your early life okay um I was born in a very very small village uh in katyawar that is today uh Gujarat so India in India right and um very very small village no electricity no running water nothing and that was the Hub of the maymond community uh their dorajis and all the others so we spent our lives there basically um we were all creative so all the men would be out of the village and uh the village consisted of older people and children interesting and come with uh come with Pakistan uh partition comes we pack our bags and uh come to Karachi settle down in Karachi and what sort of I mean so again this is the early 40s um and so what what did trading mean at the time what were these men doing that were going out to trade uh we were um actually we were trading as a family uh my grandfather went bankrupt in the crash of 1929 um he never really recovered and he died so his sons my father and his brothers uh they finally they they were looking for jobs anywhere in India primarily in sales and then under the oldest brother Emma Dowd they all got together and then they when uh and went to Mumbai uh and started a uh the yarn business selling cotton yarn right and uh from there we built up we had a ginning factory in uh near our village we grew to a point where we had a ghee Factory in Calcutta so we just started to get into industry uh when partition came the family moved over my father stayed back for one year uh over the 1948 to sell off all our Assets in India we had a few shops and then we had this ghee facility in Calcutta so I was in uh Calcutta that and my sort of first formal education was in some school in Calcutta interesting so then in 19 at the end of 1948 we came to Pakistan in Karachi and Karachi and Karachi and and in Karachi you had absolutely no base there was no business interest there at the time no nothing it really had to start from scratch we had to start from scratch um we got a house in Karachi for the house that we gave up in India so uh we um we started to settle down uh the smart thing that my uncle did uh I'm a doubt he's told the family you stay in Pakistan I'm off to London right because he saw a new country being uh uh coming up now Pakistan was born and so he went to England to start supplying uh textiles from Manchester to Pakistan to Pakistan because it was so such a death of yarn uh cloth whatever so uh he settled in uh in in Manchester while he was there then he said okay he and my father and the elders took a decision [Music] England right so uh eight of us were sent to England you and your cousin so you your brothers and your brother and my cousins right then the others came back and there's really five of us who stayed on in one um in one English Public School out in Yorkshire uh a very rugged School um and and I must say uh that's cool [Music] really developed us because we were on our own you had to play rugby you had to um settle with the uh with the English boys and looking back I think it was it was a a good decision was it a lot of pakistanis there at the time in England we were the only we were the first first few pakistanis that went to England and it was only in the late late 50s that we started seeing the first uh immigrants immigrants coming in and they were started coming and were coming in all the time and yes it was you could see them all coming in and then you could see the progressive uh development of the immigrants they went into shops on the industries Mega uh uh so uh you could see we were in school so ours was a different uh thing were you visiting Pakistan a lot I mean this is a different time that the trans like the travel industry is not that big so were you would you be coming to Pakistan every year or would we would be coming fairly frequently uh and uh but uh most of the time we were we were in in England and um then I myself I was not a very studious person I love sports really I love sports and a rugby player and a cricket player and this player and that player and uh I was so engrossed in um Sports and I never never paid attention to academics at all uh with the result that I failed my o levels I had to repeat it fine no problem didn't bother me I was a sportsman right was it very expensive or was this essentially publicly funded the education was it very expensive not at all not at all it was just a waste of time no money yeah yeah so um I um I was not a very uh much academic minded um and one particular day it happens these things I don't know whether other people believe it but um I was sitting on the bus um coming from school and my cousin was with me and I don't know what it was but I was looking outside the bus window and I suddenly saw a flash and I said to my cousin did you see that lightning he said what lightning he's a very clear day how can you have a lightning tonight it was it was Maghrib time I said no no but there was a flash and he said oh you're dreaming so I looked at him and I said from now on I'm going to work I'm going to study and I'm going to start my life differently and that was it just that one moment I went back and then that was it complete switch switch sports do a little bit now it's academics academics academics how old were you at the time it happened in September 1961. so uh I was about 17 and that was that changed my life uh completely and so you did your OA levels from then right they got their past the oil levels past the ear levels went to University um did play rugby at University but it was um it was no longer that the primary drive yeah it's not so absorbing as it was before right uh and then my life really changed when um I went to America for my MBA before the MBA your your education and your University was for engineering engineering I was doing mining engineering at Newcastle and because ironically in those days uh you had to have permission uh from the State Bank uh uh so they would remit the money and they would not remit money if you did mechanical engineering civil engineer because they were available in Pakistan oh I see those programs that were not available in Pakistan like Metallurgy uh uh engineering uh mining mining engineering chemical engineering but if you did mechanical civil no so I said okay I'll do mining engineering was there something of your interest or was there something you did no no it was interesting uh engineering did interest me um little did I know that that engineering um how it would help me later in life I hadn't a clue but you know um you have these um things are stored in life for you you don't know when the uh when you did something 10 years earlier and now you say oh I see now I understand why why Allah made you do that never a moment wasted right that's right that's right interesting and um but the experience of the MBA the experience of American Education the experience of being in New York uh it was absolutely transforming I love that program got absorbed in it completely uh and um by the time it was over I was ready to come back and get into business I was New York at the time I mean very different how was New York at the time um Columbia University at that time was uh Harlem was a pretty uh uh uh rough Place much rougher than today uh America was going through militancy you had the Vietnam War students were out on the streets uh Colombia had the famous strike the famous Columbia University strike of 1968 was there when I was on campus uh so it was a very regular time Colombia uh Berkeley University uh University of California Berkeley they were at the Forefront of the students movements um so it was a a very difficult time uh Martin Luther King had been assassinated Robert Kennedy was assassinated um and that was the time when the uh the African Americans were really pushing pushing for their rights uh so we could we were seeing it all on television of how they were all um the civil rights movement in America so there were um there was a lot happening there there was a lot happening America working the 50s America was peaceful the 60s America was volatile and as a Pakistani I mean really when all of these sort of race conversations were going on um sometimes you know or at the very least even these days when you're looking at black lives matter and a lot of those movements happening you know those the conversation then really begins to expand and lots of other nationalities start to get alienated as well how would you feel as a Pakistani I'm sure there weren't a lot of pakistanis there and probably not a lot of Asians uh no they were not very very few pakistanis at that time uh I was um during my time there was no Pakistani in the business school but Pakistani said just started coming to New York overall uh going to American universities right yes they had just [Music] uh they had started and we and one other person were they uh were one of the first few um my cousin went to um Harvard my other cousin went to Northwestern uh then my other cousin they started going to Berkeley uh so and many other pakistanis started to move um it was good it was the beginning we're all understanding a different world um so um it was overall the thing that got me the most was I never realized what hard work was until I went to America real hard work not even in England even though I mean you it's not like your family was there or you had this sort of a safety net you know in England at the universities there you never had that kind of pressure academically academically right no in America it was a totally totally different um like real sharks are really how yeah when you registered at the University they gave you an envelope and it said on the envelope do not open until you have registered right okay so I registered and then I they gave you this envelope and I took it to my room and I threw it on the bed and American bump propaganda so finally I opened it it was the assignment for the next day I said what the assignment for the next day in class the first day of class I skimmed through it um went into class and the professor holds a deck of cards and pulls one out oh Mr signs will come out and present the case and and then he went out and he cut cut starts writing on the board and this and that and the debate starts the business issues of that company it shook me yeah what is this uh and that's the way Americans work uh I asked a very stupid question uh to the librarian uh I said when do you close she says close the library is open throughout the night come whenever you want and then you're in the library you're walking home uh uh and at midnight there'll be somebody jogging somebody doing this it's a different world I didn't see that it's always alive it's always awake it's yeah absolutely and and funny thing was I absorbed it and I loved it this is the this is the life you want um being active being busy all the time uh and um so that's that's what America really taught me and in what year did you come back I came back in 68 and so before we move forward uh run me through a little bit about what was happening while all of you boys were away from 61 to 68 because now you're you're you're essentially parents are figuring out um no not just 61 to 68 you've been out for a while yeah we went in 1950 came back in 1668 right so 18 years um meanwhile someone is setting up some sort of structures here uh I'm assuming that was your your my uh Uncle my father and my other two uncles uh all this while they were building up our business and my uncle particularly was a very very very very aggressive man uh he could smell an opportunity a mile away and um so we went into the cotton Mills we went into borobala we went into a lot of sport we went to the canopoly and our uh uh business here while we were away the family was busy building up and it was mostly textile uh no textiles paper and then uh By the time 68 came uh we started construction of our fertilizer plant right the paper mill uh uh was in East Pakistan uh and also we put up a viscose rayon uh unit we had a chemical plant we had jute we had shipping it was a period not period because I would say the D period when Pakistan industry really grew and the amine family put up the national refinery um so by the time 68 came what was it our Pakistani entrepreneurs had moved from the primary industry of textiles and now started to go into the secondary chemical plants the Cycles went into the kalashaco complex we were in doubt Hercules a main family put up the uh the national refinery we had a viscose rayon plant in East Pakistan and that was going when the debacle in East Pakistan took place and then back in Pakistan nationalization and then we were the curve changed yeah so tell me about you coming back and it's 1968. um what's Pakistan like at the time and what do you join straight up coming back uh when we when I came back um Pakistan we were it was the end of what they call the decade of development and the anti-ukan movement it just started uh people were upset with uh the way the development was going on and then Marvel hot made that statement that uh 80 percent of business is controlled by the 22 family so the 22 families became a target for politicians were you guys part of the one of those 22 families yeah we were in the top few yeah so we were we were getting a lot of the uh the flap on that uh so when I arrived um it was interesting my father said I want you to work under me in Karachi and I was absolutely horrified I said I don't want to work under you and I don't want to work in Karachi we had just built our air-conditioned building he said I don't want to work here and I don't want to work under you and he was very upset and this arguments went on for a few weeks uh and then I remember I told him I said father why don't you allow me to find my place in the Sun I will never grow if I am under your shadow you're too big at a man I'm too small I don't want to be under your shadow just let me go and let my let me find my place in the Sun and I touched him he said okay and so now where do you put me I see he said where do you want to go I said I don't mind anywhere anywhere [Music] so they said okay you go to our textile a Woolen textile mill and at La in larosport in uh District attack okay you send me that I don't mind so they sent me there and you know after a few months I just fell in love with the place there I was I was what 25 26. uh they made me the managing director oh at that age um and I just love the place there was so much work to do I would be um I would be uh involved in the middle going to the middle at one o'clock at night two o'clock at night and I just poured out my energy onto learning how to [Music] um how to run a mill I knew nothing about how to make a fabric knew nothing yawn I knew nothing I remember that first meeting we had uh I had with the uh with all the offices the Mills manager and the general manager uh and I remember I said to them look um I know nothing about how to make a cloth but I promise you I will work hard and I promise you I will learn uh and I can put certain things on the table on marketing on production methods and this and that because I've learned it at Columbia uh but uh I promise you that I will I will work and learn from you people and it was a lovely lovely interaction um it was a great great experience because in the outside world the movement against Yukon had started workers were militant militancy started at larosport we had one strike after another strike and here I was a youngster facing uh the full Brunt of industrial labor militancy and this was essentially left wing sort of socialist militancy yeah and were they operating under a union or was this more Loosely placed were they were they operating under a union or was this more lose no it was a strong union very strong union uh and at that time all Outsiders professional unionist would go and capture various uh unions and ours was a uh they they really it was an outside an outsider that came and instigated them right uh and finally took me about a year or so to get rid of that outside Outsider and then peace came and um and then we had a lovely uh relationship with the Union a very good relationship and um um so how different do you think the work culture was back in the day how different do you think the work culture was back in the day compared to how it is now well actually um the labor laws in those days when I read them I said my God these labor laws are not fair they're heavily loaded in favor of management so it was obvious that he's not going to last long and when the militancy came uh and labor was not allowed to go on strike it will banned you can go through the process but you can't strike and then I remember I came to Lahore and they asked me to there was a government Commission on uh whether uh workers should have the right to strike and many of the business friends they said they should not have the right to strike and they asked me should have the right to strike I said yes that's the balance if workers cannot go on strike then uh where's the balance the next off favor to uh management must know that if the the threat of strike uh is real and they can get hurt too uh so those laws were changed newer newer uh industrial relations Ordnance came out and they had the right to strike and I was a I felt felt it very very strongly because we had a lot of militancy but fantastic learning experience and once we finished uh all the strikes were over uh this was around February March 1971. so by that time I was okay Polaris 4 was a an experience because I could apply the marketing skills that I had learned at Columbia and so we went into newer products uh I said to myself well I should tell people but hey in Pakistan they don't understand Market segmentation they want they don't understand it I'd been taught by an excellent professor at Columbia what Market segmentation is all about and so you could see it uh so it was it was nice to um we came out with new products ladies Fabrics uh and so many other segments in the market um so that was a overall a wonderful experience I loved it I really am meeting the workers meeting their children um walking around the uh the we had a colony there checking that is everything fine with them uh it was and Lawrenceburg was essentially uh providing I mean selling these products to uh what was exporting or was it for the Pakistani market and well very little was exported very little um it was um 95 percent uh local market right and you're mentioning you finally were able to relax in March 1971 and then we know what happened in December how did that impact you yourself and then how did that impact the entire family business oh that was a dramatic dramatic thing because um when things happened in East Pakistan obviously because our unit was such a big unit they can offer the paper mills and the canal for the rayon and canopoly chemicals that became a focus of the attack and we had to get our family people out we got them all out [Music] um and then oh it it really uh impacted the family because all of a sudden when East Pakistan went uh and Bangladesh was created all our units were taken over by the uh the new Bangladesh government it was classified as enemy property and they just took over and you never got any diamonds nothing nothing not from the not even from the government of Pakistan nothing and and what made matters worse shortly as we were licking our wounds from East Pakistan then here in West Pakistan Bhutto nationalized industry so it was oh my God so all of a sudden we just shrank family members were all there there's so many family members who are all busy in different units uh suddenly uh with the nationalization all of it was taken away yeah uh uh no we well let me put it this way we lost very heavily in East Pakistan in West Pakistan we lost but not as uh as heavily as a fancy family the saigo family they lost more uh because they mostly had their interest in West Pakistan is that yeah because they at that time uh textiles was not nationalized everything else was so uh we were also we were lucky that we had foreign investment in our fertilizer so anything uh the fertilizer was not touched a mean family lost their National Refinery which was the main stay of the family yeah so it was a dramatic uh and then a few and then a couple of years later the banks were nationalized and then um um flour Mills and rice Mills were nationalized ginning factories were nationalized they were it was quite a uh were the original families paid off for the for the were the original families paid off for the businesses that the government took over no yes yes they were given bonds they could sell at a discount in the market and they did was it was it enough to cover for the no no no no it was a pretty uh uh we got a very it was taken away the very discounted uh and then that began the uh and then the other big thing that Pakistan lost is that all the families uh family members started leaving for Canada and America so we lost a lot of our business DNA essentially that that was a very major loss so um so that's what it was and um for me a dramatic turn came in 1972. when um my uncle uh I'm a dog said to me that um look I want you to be transferred to Lahore because we're having problems with our Hercules partner and we think that you are the best to see be there and try to solve it so I came over I left larosport it was a very very sad day because I just didn't want to leave it um and then so I came to Lahore to Lahore and trying to sort out the problems between the partners and and what business was this and what was the problem right it was the year urea fertilizer plant it just came on stream uh at the end of um 71. and um so I joined in 72 um and as luck would have it Faith whatever now I got an exposure to um I got an exposure to things that I had never had an exposure to before I had there was no labor issues were not in the same um but I spent 90 percent of my time on International Partners relationships corporate issues how to solve corporate matters reading a lot of agreements which I never had to do before you were all in all now you have a partner American partner you have issues that you had to sort out with them and so he gave me a complete different perspective I have forgot textiles was behind me forget being a a big boss uh in a rural setting you are now Cog in the wheel with a Galaxy of Americans working there um and it took one year one year and a few months to solve the problem with our partners into assault I became the managing director of uh without Hercules and so I spent the rest of my eight years being the managing director and that period opened many many new avenues for me and I started now I my engineering Danny came to the phone right I started asking questions what about this what about this what about this learning uh drawings detailed Engineering Process engineering um what type of various types of materials alloyed and you started learning about um Construction um you learned about maintenance [Music] and so little did I know at that time that I was being prepared for the next phase of my life I didn't know um so um and not faithful day came before we move on to the next chapter um that was a Hercules fertilizer is is that what converted into angrow eventually no it now is converted into Fatma uh it was sold to the Fatma group um Hussein uh bought into angrow finally took control of angrow and so he sold that that Hercules to the Fatma family oh so Anglo existed separately it existed separately at that time in this when I was the they were only in the private sector there were only two fertilizer plant one was by angrow uh and the other was ours right so um those were the only two right um and um so I was there in Dallas Hercules and then you could see that uh differences were growing within the family right and then your time came when um the family broke up family broke up I left out Hercules and then little did I know that that was um my father said to me that okay now you're leaving doubt Hercules uh what what are you gonna do I said I'll go into engineering I said okay and what do you have is this um actually 77 which is a little before I left we had actually formed the company because I could see the writing on the wall and people were advising me that look it's going to break uh get your get yourself ready and I did uh so uh here I was in in descon and myself and four Engineers from those Hercules right it's not sort of like a startup it's a startup we were in a room maybe just the size of this room uh and um myself and four uh we started to um think okay um and what was the idea what was the core idea at the time essentially the problem that you were solving were you going to provide engineering solution to Industries that's right is it what it was is at that time you know Pakistan civil engineering was developed right Gammon was a company here McDonald's Layton was another company so civil engineering uh they were reasonable companies mechanical electrical none I said this is an opportunity because there is nobody in the mechanical side why should I compete with this with the Civil my services are completely hmm uh let me go into mechanical hmm I said okay let's do mechanical what in mechanical and mechanical so um mechanical election mechanical on the design engineering Side manufacturing side all in that area so um we suddenly started and business started to come in because there was no proper organized mechanical company there were companies but they were all um One Man shows a small ticketar Consulting of sorts yeah but not uh not with us so we came in and and the idea really was any business group would come in and say listen we want to set up a dairy processing plant and so you help us identify the Machinery or within the processes no they would identify the machinery they would bring the Machinery in and then they'd come to us here are the drawings set it up uh uh so we uh we had a construction drawing we knew how we understood those drawings and we were elected we erected a Sugar Mill we erected a very small um refinery so we started uh moving in that direction and um what was it uh you know whenever you get into something always an opportunity comes and for our opportunity was the um was the huge uh National Refinery expansion in Karachi and I said this is it now we must go and do whatever is necessary to try to win this job and many people many people told me that don't do it it's too big it's too big you will not be able to do it and you fall flat on your faith take a small part of it not the whole thing I said no I've got the energy I can do it there's nothing else to do I'll just sit and get this job done um and alhamdulillah we want it uh we only took the mechanical we didn't touch the civil uh and that was the job that Kickstart the company put us the uh on the map right then everybody knew that we had a large larger project it was a three-year project so um we now had the cash flow we had the amount of work absolutely fine and we went along I then I said look Dakota I remember that day and I caught all the senior managers and I said look we've run this job this was 1981. you people handle it because I want to tell you something else that I want to do I said what what do you want to do I said we've got to go global Pakistan I want to have a company where Pakistan is too small for us um we must go International and so I spent a lot of my time in Abu Dhabi Saudi Arabia come in and go and come in and going all the time and um we won our first job uh in 1982. so by 82 we were now in Abu Dhabi and Pakistan going well it was very interesting that um the first job we got I went to the Arab to ask him to award the job to us because we were the lowest that where the law was better give it to us he said brother you have paid 30 percent less than everybody else you must have come to me to say don't give it to you I said no I've come to tell you to give it to us says will you make money I said no it says you want the job you're going to lose money are you sure you want to I said yes that's why I've come I've come all the way from law to tell you to give it to us it's okay you're the lowest you can have it send your man tomorrow and I'll sign it and he did sign degree we signed the contract it's a very small job did it went back to him he said martial law you did a good job very good job did you make money I said well I told you I'd lose money but actually I broke even said oh he said then he said now you did such a good job you are pre-qualified for all the work we offer that's uh I was just buying my admissions ticket and you're a big laugh that's all I was doing I don't care about making money on the first job I want to settle down here and that was 30 years ago and we're still there um then we've got the next show and the next show and the next show and then we were is there any other exciting job that you got after that that you really I mean or was it more operational after that more or less no no it was uh then there was another strategic moment that came he said yeah we're all in mechanical [Music] it's now time we provided a one sh One Stop Shop so we have offered civil mechanical electrical wow so we offered that and more work came then years go by and we say you know that's not enough let's go into a turnkey Roger APC as we call it engineering uh procurement and construction where you need a lot of brain power because in the other way somebody would give you a drawing and you just do it now you had to make the drawing you had to do it fine EPC okay that's the new world before that we used to call ourselves an integrated engineering company which would do mechanical civil electrical now we're gone into the world of EPC and Unilever came to us we want a hydrogen plant and for the Ramya Khan operations the ghee Factory at Ramya Khan says can you do it on an on a complete TurnKey basis I said yes we can do it got the engineers together we're all can we do it well I love a smart engineer he says we can do it so did it problem of what happened was that we gave Unilever a Cadillac and charged the price of a Suzuki for it we lost our shirt on it I said fellas don't worry don't worry we're just entering a new era of EPC we gave them because every time we when it came to material when it came to files pumps Motors we gave them the best because we said oh no we can't affect our reputation our reputation is at stake put the best material and we did the price went up and up and up and that plant is still running it's a fabulous plant because we over designed it goodness we paid so it was interesting uh we learned a very bitter lesson but that got us into offices and GC right and then we started to do and then we we got Partners from overseas in that area went up and so now descon is a global Enterprise essentially yes yes we're now operating in Oman uh Dubai Abu Dhabi [Music] um we were in Kuwait um Saudi Arabia Qatar and our recent acquisition is in South Africa so we're now in Africa we're now getting into Africa yeah we we took a decision two years ago and then we said look we've got to get into Africa so our marketing people started scanning the whole of Africa and we saw this opportunity in South Africa so we have a facility there now um a lovely facility it's really really good uh it was a group of young engine Network they were young at that time they started the company now they've all grown all of them have grown old and they want to sell it so we said okay give it to us we'll take it interesting did you diversify into other areas as well or was engineering or desk on your full like everything oh the um we it was engineering we went into chemicals we went into power uh and uh all of it was the common thread in everything was engineering right um now while I was away uh in the government uh my sons uh take took the decision that we will now go come really diversify so we're now into agriculture we have a uh a two agriculture companies uh one is micronutrients right it's something that um the big uh fertilizer plant they can't do we can do it right it's production of that production of that it's uh it's a it's a production but it's more of a mixing you've got to be and you've got to know what is the soil and that the X point and Taylor make interesting for the uh the nutrients for that soil and then it might be different for multani different from much more optimized basically absolutely so you get a better yield very interesting so we've got into that we've gone into marketing um agricultural products and we've Now set up the desk on a research Farm in a big way in a in a big way starting to pour a lot of a lot of our energies into it and funds to let's get now we're going to get into farm management who's who's the brain behind that because I'm really into agriculture trying to understand that and I'd love to talk to that person my son is the best he's absolutely absorbed by it really absolutely he went to uh he goes overseas to um various conferences to learn talk to people understand any food conferences any agricultural issues and he goes and he is he's the one who's setting that direction right my older boy looks after the engineering right and he's gone into a new area I'm very excited about it because um engineering I regret in a sense we I've put a lot of focus on engineering [Music] but so engineering grew I wish I had put a little less and started these other things earlier so now we're a very very Diversified Group and um uh Defcon has now become after we're celebrating our 45th year uh so the brand is there the brand is recognized um so um that's been our strategy makes sense another thing that I will say and I think are your viewers and listeners would um uh would uh appreciate this or they may pick up some ideas from it um and that is the biggest problem in a family business is the transition of power from one generation to the next essentially the succession process succession process absolutely luckily for me it happened like that by circumstances um and I when uh Imran Khan asked me to join the government and I finally said yes I called everybody in the company everybody in a big hole we all got together and I announced that look at seven o'clock today I will go through the gates of the company and I will not come back it's gone uh after this meeting I will sign all the documents and I'm handing over everything to the two boys and the management we've got a good management we've got a very strong management so now it's up to you people I will not come here I will not enter this premises again uh so if so facto succession took place in 24 hours I left that gate and I never came back until Imran Khan's government uh [Music] was voted out um I came back I said look I'm not coming back to that same position I've handed it to you people you're from wherever I see you've done a good job carry on so I'm now not on the board Theory you completely cut yourself I'm gone I'm not the chairman of uh any of the companies I'm not even on the board of the companies I um I I don't attend the Strategic meetings I don't I say to my uh my my sons and to the management look upon me as a reference library a reference library goes to nobody you we go to the reference library so if you want to ask any questions any advice you're free to come you're free not to come not your call I will not call you is [Music] that's your problem made a problem here [Music] so what are you doing now are you fully retired then just no no no I can't I'll die for it um there's still a lot of work with um uh lumps I'm still the pro Chancellor um that is another story which I'll just mention uh I'm now doing uh looking after our own Foundation okay and I must say it is such an exciting thing I now don't spend any time any of my energies earning money so I spend all my energy spending money what's the foundation called it's called bar Foundation Bard is an acronym for bilkis and Abdullah right foundation and what all are you guys doing uh obviously education is one big area um but the other real big area and I'm so excited about it and spent so much time uh it absorbs you for at least six hours a day um is the um what we've written in our foundation is if any Pakistani men women anybody who has the spirit of Adventure and have the courage and determination to get to the international level in sports we are with you we will support you uh we don't do anything on the health sector you know many people are in there nobody is in sports yeah nobody I mean I've had three um different I've had an MMA star he's competing globally complained about you know lack of uh um funding or lack of support I've had a tennis star number two in Pakistan same problem I've had an Esports star same problem so I think it's a it's a it's a very hugely neglected area awesome to come and see us I shall I will please do we're looking for people and what let me tell you an example what what happened where are we right now excuse me um there was a Pakistani lady a banker mother of two she came um she bumped into me in Dubai when I was in the government and said that look I hear that you are supporting the spirit of Adventure I said yes go to Lahore I'm not involved in it go to Lahore meet them and if you can convince them they'll support you he comes to Lahore and she is a mountaineer Nyla Kiani she said I can climb K2 will you fund me I said yes so we funded her she did it and here we are a success story now we're asking Nyla to please go from University to University encouraging young people that if I can do it everybody can do it um to have one good success we've had um and now another lady has come and we're going to evaluate her she says that she can uh bike down the mountain from a very high position okay explain to us what we can do if she can do it Rebecca a young a very young girl she must be 9 or 10 years old a tennis player and her father said she is a real star will you back her okay Rebecca so she won all the tournaments Under 12 under 11 Tournament inbox on all of them uh and then the father said we've got to progress you've got to support us to go overseas let's go she went and joined the Turkmenistan tournament one Kazakhstan tournament one she beat them all she goes to Turkey beats them all there this is a little girl and then [Music] um there's a big American company IMG who support who do this at an international level in a big way they spotted her so they says okay would you support her in America we need you to support her a few guarantee support for two years [Music] we would put her in our Academy and train her and make her a real star I said done we'll give her the money and then they said okay we've selected 24 young girls around the world and we're sending them to Greece for a tournament all 24 will compete with each other they're all Future Stars she goes to Athens in the tournament gets to the semi-finals and loses I said fantastic you're up against the big boys yeah like the world-class players are all from all over and she's in December today she is now settled down in Florida at the IMG Academy I went to see I said I'm gonna I I have to go and see the academy myself is it okay and listen and we went and um then there was a tournament in New York a little not a high level or a medium level tournament she won that so now there are two tournaments coming slightly higher one in November this month next week or so and then one in December if she wins the December one which is a big one it's called the Orange Bowl if she wins that and she's a stance it's the beginning right of but um we will still have the supporter for at least another five years because she's only 11. yeah you can't I mean I can't even imagine an 11 year old giving living all on her own really no the whole family is there oh the whole family is there we funded the whole family father mother and her brother so it's it's a big big support uh they have a car there they start they're living like an uh an American Family wow uh it's it's a big big support and um so um now IMG is doing this as a business for IMG that girl Anya is her name is a startup yeah they're pumping money into her training her they've given her about seven or eight coaches four coaches on tennis one on nutrition born on physical development one on mental development wow and she's from Pakistan I mean she's from Pakistan and you know when I saw the academy it was mind-blowing Finn now menu that's when you realize how can he do it against this world-class yeah you can't do it this is something else yeah and now they're looking at her muscles and this and that make her strong hair give her the right food and it's essentially I mean it's a business yeah it's a business um and um so we have another boy in Florida we have a girl in Spain um then a guy from gilgit comes to us I run a small little Football Club in Islamabad if I um will you fund me to go to the Real Madrid School of coaching a lot of sounds promising okay so he's he's showing me there and um trying to the world is getting out now and as more and more people come forward um you see Sports is another thing that I have to do and I've told the people I'm gonna do it but when and how I have to study it get Sports scholarships go to university on a sports scholarship I want to start that or if somebody comes up to me that I'm now in Punjab University or here or there and my main Forte is do to do Sports I'll get educated but I want Sports give me a sports scholarship I'll do it why not [Music] um and then it builds up so there is then there's an issue of how to organize Sports is very badly organized we're trying to get that done there's a lot to do do you think I mean obviously there's that element where you're you're helping out through the foundation um really helping build those building blocks that that could create a sustainable sort of a Sports infrastructure or at the very least the right Talent that's going to build that um but then there's also a question of really like you mentioned IMG right for them it's a business and and businesses tend to be much more scalable and much more sustainable yeah of course hardcore businessman um why do you think people haven't been able to invest in sports um as a business there's so much opportunity you know people in this country particularly when you look at Cricket for example if we have that example where pslr now is is where all of the advertisers are putting their money in they're waiting all year for BSL um and it's really just about getting the right um what would you call it promoters from outside of Pakistan sitting with them identifying how do they work around consumer psychology because it's not I mean I know so many pakistanis who go from Pakistan to college in the US have never seen sort of football leagues six months later they're part of it because there is some sort of a Affinity either with their city or with their state or with their college um where they feel connected ports more than anything for the viewer is a way to feel connected to a community right and absolutely and in a lot of ways Pakistan May we're all about the sport we are unable to convert that into a viewing experience I feel like one can do a lot of other things absolutely but in a way what PSL did for cricketing talent by by really understanding the business aspect of it now it's in an auto the brands are coming in the leagues are finding the talent they're building the talent you know tourism I was speaking to a tennis player uh number two in Pakistan he was just about to go to um I think Armenia here at the next tournament in and you know he kept on talking about government funding and how government needs to keep on funding and I'm just like sure that's one way but also you have to understand that this is an underdeveloped country and so other developing country so there's only going to be a chunk that's going to go there alternatively why haven't we had someone come in and create a honestly a league event find someone from India go to Dubai every year there's an India Pakistan happening you know you've got cake one talking about wars but this is a really productive way of identifying who's the best you know and every year and the first time the pakistanis and I know that Pakistan is going to lose because Indians are really big on tennis the first time he's going to lose every single Pakistan he's gonna be like why did he lose let's pull in whatever money we have Getta either get a better player or send this guy to a better Academy make sure he's ready for next year because next year we have to beat them and so that sort of rivalry if you can't take it International bring it to local versus Karachi there's just an incredible opportunity there for businessmen to make money for you know athletes to be developed for the Youth to have an entertainment Outlet unfortunately we haven't been able to get into that or really been able to solve that problem what do you think oh absolutely you you've really hit the end uh a nail on the head is be able to see her and let me tell you whatever we're doing of funding uh this uh hania funding this lady to climb K2 to do this to the it's not gonna have a big impact we have to do people like myself have to do something that will have a big impact on Sports overall so we're getting a group of people together uh we've been working on it for the last three to four months uh and let me tell you what what is the type of thing we're doing let's pick football okay if we want football let's go let's go and make a survey how many football fields are there in the country let's start only from Karachi and Lahore how many football uh views are the good average just a plain field so what uh and I was surprised that there are adequate number of playing fields but they just dormant that they're not used [Music] local clubs and so I thought okay now let's organize and organize a like a Premier League get the clubs in and it doesn't matter what the level is doesn't matter you know Buddhist standard yeah it doesn't matter and then you see the money will start revolving around it some somebody somewhere VR email a Multan May will pick up a club yeah and I will start so that's what we're trying to do and we've had several meetings and inshallah we're now getting quite close to putting all the Legal Financial or governance structure and everything to make it transparent open anybody wants to come come in and everybody wants to leave leave if you want to and we'll have a whole a whole structure it'll take about another six months but it will be developed I wanted to uh I wanted to develop [Music] um well I'm not so much worried about doing it immediately [Music] I want it to be uh done well right away structure Foundation stronger you know and then institutions we'll be ready to go right uh so that's that is something that um uh our Our Own Foundation but Foundation is doing involved in education so that's uh not something that I got involved back in 1975. hmm in 1975 um I offered my services there was the Punjab MBA program at Punjab University so I said I volunteered to become a member a junk faculty so I used to teach courses I taught I taught a full courses uh from [Music] from 75 to about 81. um it was really enjoyable I loved it and then uh joy and then myself and uh and Barbara Lee uh we started lungs and um so it's been education is there is no better equalizer than education and the other good equalizer is sports somebody's good at sports you make the money with an equalizer be good at sports be good and follow education obviously education is the most important um so that's what it is um I'm gonna sort of switch the conversation and we are you know shortened time here as well so um I'm going to switch towards that side I know that you're really focused on Africa you mentioned with desk on as well um tell me about what you see there because most pakistanis they're not looking at Africa right now you know when I was in the government I I looked at uh the three things that I really spent a lot of time on one was export one was Regional connectivity and the third was industry development [Music] on Africa when we did our analysis in the ministry of Commerce Africa is a we all talk about look at India as a huge Market Africa is the same size as far as population is concerned it's almost 1.2 billion people in Africa so um I took a a very large business delegation to Kenya we we were there for three days and just to open the eyes of our business people we took people from engineering Pharmaceuticals chemicals and leather some people from textiles came but it was not not many um so here we were sitting in Kenya and I said look look at the opportunity that we have after that unfortunately because of kovid movement stopped so as soon as kovid was over we went to Nigeria and Nigeria again a remarkable Market and Africa and so we're seeing our exports to Africa grow nowhere near what is the potential um and whether you get into Egypt or you get into um [Music] into Tanzania or Botswana or even to the uh francophone countries but it's um its potential is tremendous and now Africa was broken up into uh three or four Regional uh uh economic grouping and now they're going to have one for the whole of Africa so it doesn't matter where you are you can ship your goods uh right across the continent so it's something that's tremendous one is Africa and the other is the Central Asian republics that's where the regional connectivity essentially is important absolutely I made several visits to Uzbekistan Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan and we in order to get our connectivity they are Four Agreements that you have to do and getting those agreements done that's what takes time you have a PTA Transit Trade Agreement you have agreement on customs you have it what they call a TIR uh protocol the TIR protocol is once you're under that protocol it's by a Pakistani truck can go anywhere right and you're not stopped at the borders right you just go straight through as they do in Europe right we experimented with one truck uh it went all the way from Pakistan to Moscow nobody stopped it uh we've tried another one it went from Pakistan Iran uh into turkey no issue so but it requires a lot of effort to get all the the Customs protocol in place or at the border everybody knows what has to be done that if this truck is a truck under the TIR it goes through and they have the documentation done uh they because the three documents document for the truck to go through document for the goods in the truck and document for the driver and his assistant so there's a special passport for them special paperwork and it just goes straight through so um and then when you look at Africa and uh the central election Republic the Central Asian republics were saying they want to send goods to Africa your best point is Karachi hmm Africans were saying we want to send our stuff to the where is the contact Point Karachi so that whole area and it will require it it would for me to really flourish would take about another three three years to really get it going the the movement has started but it's not as smooth because we have to make a big investment uh on the custom house the uh parking area for trucks uh all the formality areas at the turken border we've got to do the same thing at desmir uh on the border of uh Uzbekistan all these Investments have to be made and then it can really see we're now doing maybe 100 trucks a day but that's nothing we're going to get it way way up and you've got to I went I personally went to the Border uh with Afghanistan and I walked that whole area there's a bottlenecks there a truck can't turn because the road is too narrow uh you've got to do this you've got to do that and we have to put money there afghanist will not put their money we're allowed to put no money doesn't matter it helps us [Music] um so um immense potential so I understand the regional connectivity now you've explained that context tell me a little bit about exports because that's just been sort of the exports we're stuck right in fact then we talk all about exports the biggest problem in exports is it's just that our government for years for the last 30 years uh and even now have not understood that an export-led growth strategy is the only way we can move forward our biggest problem is that we do not have we don't earn enough dollars how can we earn that is through an export growth strategy and whenever we focused on it it's moved it moved in the last three years it moved textiles grew at 26 percent our I.T grew at about 46 percent [Music] um we have to put Focus and there are many many many steps that we have to understand which we don't understand unfortunately neither does members of the Covenant understand neither do the Ministry of Finance understand nor does um the FBR understand because what you do to increase exports you will have to compromise on some parts of your Revenue the more taxes you put on raw materials and things it's a bigger anti-export bias get rid of those taxes which we did I myself went through the whole process and I'm very grateful to the finance ministers uh they allowed now most of the raw material in Pakistan comes duty-free right but they're now putting other taxes additional custom duty there's that um it requires a very very comprehensive um export policies um we also do you know that um and this takes at least five years to do we do not belong to any Regional uh organizations trade organizations we're not part of asean hmm we are part of uh the worst uh region of a sock that India it doesn't work yeah we're not part of uh I was actually seeing bricks everybody and like bricks a lot of countries are beginning to want to get into it I was seeing Pakistan was missing there there's lots of countries from Africa are going there as well yes um I think the only functional one that I can see is the SEO that we've recently joined yeah and there are good regional trade blocks and now the ones that are coming up in Africa we must get into those Waters that we wrote to them that we want to be collected with you uh but it requires a lot of effort um to get into uh into this Regional blocks and have a relationship with them um so exports can be done question is which are our best products for exports products where the raw material is within the country agricultural products cement [Music] blast because we have the uh raw material here um textiles because we have the cotton so there are many many many products that we can do provided we develop it in a sustainable manner the one that's going very well is rice we are over two billion dollars per annum of rice rice huge it's huge um then but for example what is the uh we have problems of um geographical um there's a concept called geographical indication so Basmati is ours we never registered it India goes and register it so now we have to fight them that look Basmati belongs jointly you grow Basmati we grow Basmati and inshallah we win that case um so finally we got the laws in now the laws are in about geographical indication we have many many things whether it's a multani tile whether it's the showery Chapels they belong to us nobody can use that brand it belongs to the people of Pakistan so now we've started registering them I think um when I joined the government this time I I saw Ralph Lauren advertising chapels so I wrote to them yeah you can't use that yeah just show me where you've got your geographical indication we didn't have the laws right so we've got to get the laws in place and uh we now have maybe uh 20 India has about two or three thousand Germany has something like 16 000. all the Bavarian cakes and the Bavarian deaths and the Bavarian that uh the Bavarian wines and this and that it is all German product you want to use that name you pay them you see it's um so we're beginning to go through us that time and also Pakistani don't now they're beginning to understand the value of a brand so then there is a uh Madrid protocol finally we got that activated so if you register for example if Nissan wants to register on on the Madrid protocol he is automatically registered in 60 countries oh done you just registered us the we have now registered that's gone there it's uh it it is a it is a Pakistani brand [Music] everybody must do it so there's a lot of work that has to be done we have to pay attention are we doing it from one government to the next to the next we're not okay and so we start activities for two years three years government changes and it slows down another one comes it'll pick up and it will slow down that's where we're at whereas in India they've been persistently doing it and so that's why they've gone very far um the amount of good quality products we have um our potatoes is one of the one particular brand of potatoes unique unique and people are willing to pay premium prices for it but how do we get the whole ecosystem that's those are the questions makes sense um and and this is going to be the last question on this side but um you know you spoke about agriculture um and then I think that the potential there with increasing yields with the potential food crisis that's supposedly growing all across the world I think there's the incredible potential there but you know with a huge population young population you have to really begin to identify what what a lot of these young people would be doing and so you can I mean with Services you see you know digital opportunities and I.T uh jobs and they're definitely growing but one area that I feel like in Pakistan has been unable to really figure itself out has been the industries um the industries right for most part um either even if you have Industries like the auto manufacturing industry it's mostly just assembling taking stuff from China assembling it um branding it it's even pharmaceutical I was talking to the other day and they said most of our active ingredients are coming from abroad and it's it's sort of sad because you have a I mean at least a a segment of it a seemingly educated a population who's seemingly can solve these problems and reverse engineer the way that China did right um again it will reduce the cost of on the dollar uh for you and also potentially can make you competitive for exports as well whenever we think about exports are we only focused on textile and Agriculture and maybe the maybe IIT maximum maybe a little chunk of surgical goods and Sporting Goods why can't we begin to imagine export of pharmaceuticals export of automobile for example I think when I see the African Market [Music] um there's an incredible opportunity for countries like China to be investing in Pakistan because you have a you have a comparatively low cost population uh and a young population that can really turn out a lot of these sort of comparatively lower value goods for these developing economies that need those goods and since China is moving to more Advanced Technologies um foreign foreign of taxes where it is profitable to just bring in something from outside do some little work on it and then sell it and it becomes profitable then there's something wrong with the model the business model is wrong okay what you have to do is and these were some of the changes that I did there's not a lot more has to be done um take for example Auto [Music] um now a Pakistani car the maximum deletion is 40 percent 45 percent in the case of a tractor it's 100 almost 100 so tractors are good and they're being exported right you will never be able to export any Auto unless you start taking up the level of um deletion in the case of a motorcycle is now fast approaching 85 percent deletion this simpler part there's no the models don't change So It Goes On in the case of the car are we as a nation prepare to say okay we will live with the same design of the car for the next 10 years 15 years we're not hmm there's a pressure name any name model say your name model say name model uh name models little but then you can't look alive because you've got to do retooling you've got to do all that China I checked with them when they first came into the car for 15 years it was only that car full stop no other car you could only buy one car in China you drive that car and I said wife why what was the point there's one sweet understood the car once we understood every single part once we were able to make every single part once we were able to design every single part once we were able to put in all the pieces then we said now let's design another car locally then do the retooling and slowly it came up after that we're not a long-term player [Music] um and you'll soon seek the Pakistan public [Music] uh this is not good enough we need more variety we have such a huge variety of cars coming into Pakistan we all see it on the roads every day why India had the Ambassador car for years that's the way to do it Pakistan doesn't do that we have become a consumption-led growth strategy rather than an export-led Coke strategy you can't you will not be we don't have the necessary amount of Foreign Exchange coming in you can't do that and so we run into trouble every so often do you think it's a problem there's a solvable problem though do you think that's a solvable problem do you think um you know with the right government or the right policy it's not of course it is of course yes yes it takes time it takes time um sir I'm gonna ask you um I mean before I ask you the last question that I generally ask one of my guests I do want to ask you I mean you've you've been through the East pakistanio family has been through the whole East Pakistan debacle um and then eventually you know with the nationalization um then you did obviously end up you know you worked at the at the fertilizer plant and then you set up desk on do you ever regret coming back to Pakistan after your education do you think you would have performed better elsewhere oh no I have no regrets absolutely no regrets when um when um uh the nationalization took place um our seniors asked me do you want to move to Canada I said no I'll rather be here and now my brothers went they moved to Canada I didn't and just a few months ago we were talking and I was talking to my uh my brother I said well you moved to Canada and I stayed here let's now evaluate um who which was the right decision children's education his children got educated in Canada mine were here I said is are my children any are at any disadvantage they went to American universities as your children went to American universities your work in Canada my work in Pakistan uh your connections with the family there's that all the other issues we concluded that the decision to stay in Pakistan the correct one I believe it I wouldn't go I think it was the one of the best decisions I took to stay on in Pakistan yeah and the last question um I mean to be very honest the audience knows it this has been one of the most profound conversations I've had on this channel in 300 conversations uh the stories that you've told me really gave me a context of the past in a way that I've never heard before um so thank you for that um based on everything that you've told me and it's based on everything that you've experienced if I were to ask you um how do you see 28 years from now the Pakistan of 2050 seeing what you've seen seeing how things have evolved um obviously is 70s foreign foreign [Music] by any standards um I honestly feel that um how how many countries have we known that have gone into almost despair before they've recovered and now are very strong countries if you ask an American in 1865 he said the country is about to go America is about to go Civil War was on Abraham Lincoln have been assassinated it was uh the so-called blacks were now free how can this country survive but he survived look at Germany after World War One about to finish and many other countries have gone through this China has gone through it Russia has gone through it when the bolshuk's revolution came [Music] um fine we are now I feel at a very very crucial stage there's gonna be ups and downs well we'll be it will be a low level low worth of a roller coaster we will our society may be ripped uh but that's okay that's part of the development of a country we're only 75 years old there's nothing in the making of a Nation so I I tell everybody we must be hopeful about it that will get through this uh political Quagmire that we're in we'll get through it we should whenever I talk to my friends we always say our job is to keep doing what we're doing don't stop um fine we will work things out uh it will be difficult it will be acrimonious it will take time but inshallah will be through and I have every hope that we will get through I hope inshallah you know we're we're able to see the combination of that hope uh you know in 2050. sir thank you so much for for sharing all the Insight uh and for giving us two hours of your time now it was for 60 minutes we're at the one hour 15 minute 55 minute Mark um One More Time Has Gone by yeah it has it has been luncheon at one o'clock but thank you so much for hearing all the inside thank you very much thank you and for all of you guys thank you so much for watching episode uh comment section okay what are your thoughts on uh you know uh results story um about Pakistan of the past uh and also about industrialization about Pakistan's exports and the problem thereof um foreign things thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one
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