On January 6, 2025, Muhammad Afzal, the founder of A.H. Homes, a Lahore-based real estate and construction company with a two-decade track record in luxury housing projects, was considering how to reinvest the Rs 100 million (about US$358,946) he had received from the highly profitable project he had just closed. Afzal was faced with three possible reinvestment avenues: reinvest in the local Lahore real estate market he knew best, enter the Dubai .....more

This case looks at Nawabi Fries, an experiential entrepreneurship project in an undergraduate course at the Islamia University of Bahawalpur. To move beyond traditional simulations, the instructor turned the classroom into a real-world venture lab. Students worked with Muhammad Asif, a daily-wage labourer facing serious financial hardship. Guided by effectuation theory and value-creation teaching, the students and Asif built a micro-enterprise with .....more

Launched in 2021 by the Punjab Information Technology Board Pakistan, Regional Plan9 (RP9) aimed to foster entrepreneurship in secondary cities by establishing nine incubation centres throughout Punjab. These centres supported start-ups with mentorship, networking opportunities, office space, and financial assistance. Despite its early achievements, RP9 faced an uncertain future due to the impending withdrawal of funding. The original funding, provided .....more

Pakistan Mobile Communications Limited (Jazz), based in Islamabad, rebranded its telecommunications (telecom) self-service app Jazz World as SIMOSA in May 2024, aiming to transform it into a comprehensive digital lifestyle platform for all mobile users. Despite facing challenges in maintaining the app’s cultural relevance and expanding its market reach, Jazz successfully achieved a new brand identity through the app’s revamped design, expanded access, .....more

Maria took a final glance at the company accounts, then closed her laptop. On New Year’s Eve of 2022, she had mixed emotions reflecting on the journey of the past two years. In just fifteen days, it would be Merafuture's two year anniversary as a registered company. 2020 and 2021 were anything but normal for the world, and it was no different for Merafuture. In August 2021, after struggling for the first year and a half, the company began to show .....more

On New Year’s Eve of 2018, Amjad Dar, head of Brics Online, is considering alternatives going forward for operating Brics Online, a business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce arm of Brics Pakistan (Brics). The main decision to be taken is whether Brics Online should be operated centrally (through a dedicated warehouse) or merged with stores to allow for decentralized operations. Centralized operations in the first year of Brics Online produced considerable .....more

In 2022, the manager of Hyundai Nishat Motor (Private) Limited was ambitious to expand the company in Pakistan and continue its hard-earned growth. His first step was determining whether the expansion plan was worth it. But how could he estimate the cost of equity of a privately held firm? Although the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) and dividend discount model (DDM) were most commonly used to calculate the cost of equity, neither of those models .....more

Over a decade ago, Jazz, Pakistan’s largest data operator, embarked on a transformative journey toward fostering diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) within its organizational culture. Spearheaded by the vision of the chief executive officer and supported by a dedicated leadership team, Jazz undertook initiatives to create a gender-inclusive workplace. The organization introduced programs to support married women, women with children, and women .....more

On January 2, 2018, the chief executive officer of a private company in Karachi, Pakistan, Imaam Spinning Mills (Imaam), was planning to expand the company’s product line and enter the weaving business by setting up a new weaving plant. He asked his chief financial officer to conduct a financial evaluation financial evaluation of the project. To do so, she needed to calculate the weighted average cost of capital, using the comparative method to calculate .....more

On March 17, 2018, the founder and owner of Memon Lubricants, a Shell Pakistan Limited distributor located in Sukkur, Pakistan, was trying to find the best recruitment process to hire a new sales team. Memon Lubricants had just opened a second location in Khairpur, approximately 30 kilometres south of Sukkur. Several constraints that affected the process included a tight budget, limited availability of skilled and qualified candidates, and pressure .....more