KARACHI: Bestway Cement Limited — BWCL on the Pakistan Stock Exchange — is the Pakistani industrial arm of one of Britain's most successful immigrant-built business empires. Its parent, the Bestway Group, began as a London convenience store and grew into a wholesale, pharmacy and retail giant under its founder, Sir Anwar Pervez, a bus conductor turned billionaire who arrived in Britain from Pakistan as a young man. The group's decision in the 1990s to invest heavily back in Pakistan — first in cement at Hattar, then in banking, then in more cement — turned Bestway Cement into one of the largest producers in the country's northern market, assembled through a thirty-year campaign of greenfield plants and takeovers that absorbed Mustehkam Cement and Lafarge's Pakistani business along the way. For a reader of the PSX, BWCL is the clearest example of diaspora capital industrialising the homeland: British wholesale profits, converted into kilns above the Indus plain.
What Bestway Cement makes and sells
Bestway Cement manufactures and sells cement — principally Ordinary Portland Cement, together with sulphate-resistant and low-alkali varieties for specialised construction — from a cluster of plants in Pakistan's north: Hattar and Farooqia in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and Chakwal and Kallar Kahar in northern Punjab. Cement is a bulk, low-value-to-weight product, so geography is destiny: a plant sells economically within a few hundred kilometres, and Bestway's map is deliberately concentrated on the northern zone — Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Lahore's northern hinterland, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Azad Kashmir — with exports, historically significant, moving overland to Afghanistan and, at times, by sea and land to other regional markets. The company has long described itself in group materials as Pakistan's largest cement exporter to Afghanistan.
Production follows the standard dry-process route: limestone and other raw materials are quarried, crushed and ground, fired in rotary kilns at very high temperature to make clinker, then ground again with gypsum into cement, bagged or dispatched in bulk. The company's stated vision — to produce high-quality cement at the lowest cost — is not boilerplate; in a commodity where brands command only modest premiums, cost per tonne decides who survives price wars, and Bestway has invested accordingly in scale, captive and waste-heat power, and large modern lines. The sector's overall economics are set out in PSX cement stocks, where BWCL sits among the northern majors.
The Bestway Group: from Bradford Road to a global group
The parent story begins in 1963, when Anwar Pervez arrived in Britain and worked, among other jobs, as a bus conductor in Bradford before opening a convenience store in London in 1970. In 1976 he founded Bestway Wholesale, building a cash-and-carry empire serving independent retailers; the group later added the Batleys wholesale business, the pharmacy chain rebranded as Well Pharmacy, the Bargain Booze and Wine Rack off-licence brands and the Costcutter convenience-store network, alongside property and the Bestway Wholesale and retail interests that made it one of Britain's largest privately held groups. Pervez was knighted in 1999, and the group's chief executive in its expansion era, Zameer Choudrey — later Lord Choudrey — became the public face of its Pakistani investments.
For Pakistan, the group's significance is that it recycled British earnings into Pakistani industry at a scale few diaspora investors matched. The two flagship moves were cement and banking: the group was a partner, alongside the Abu Dhabi Group, in the consortium that won control of United Bank Limited in its 2002 privatisation, and it built Bestway Cement from scratch. The cement company thus sits inside a group whose balance sheet, management bench and political relationships span two countries — relevant context when judging its ability to fund expansions through Pakistan's downturns.
Building the cement business: Hattar, Chakwal, Mustehkam
Bestway Cement's first plant rose at Hattar, the industrial estate near Haripur in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, set up in 1995 with an initial investment of about US$120 million and initial capacity of just under one million tonnes a year, expanded in 2002. The second greenfield step was much larger: a plant at Chakwal in Punjab, decided in 2004 at a cost reported around US$180 million, whose kiln was fired in 2006 with 1.8 million tonnes of annual capacity — and which was followed almost immediately by plans for a second Chakwal line of the same size, in production by 2008. In between came the group's first acquisition: in September 2005 Bestway won the privatisation bid for Mustehkam Cement, taking about 85 per cent of the state-sold company for roughly US$70 million; the plant — the Farooqia works — was revived, expanded to about 1.1 million tonnes a year by 2010, and ultimately merged into Bestway Cement in 2013.
The pattern visible by then was deliberate: a tight northern cluster, each plant within economical trucking distance of overlapping markets, fed by shared limestone reserves, management and logistics, and expanded in large increments whenever demand — Pakistan's construction cycles, Afghan reconstruction demand, and later the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor build-out — justified new kilns. Capacity that began below one million tonnes in 1995 had multiplied several-fold within fifteen years, and the company had become a fixture of the northern market's top tier.
The Lafarge deal: buying the competition's best plant
The defining transaction came in July 2014. The French group Lafarge, reshaping its global portfolio, sold its 75.86 per cent stake in Lafarge Pakistan Cement to Bestway at an enterprise value of about US$329 million; Bestway then acquired further shares through a public offer, taking its holding to roughly 88 per cent. The acquired company — renamed Pakcem — operated a modern integrated plant at Kallar Kahar, near Chakwal. That plant had its own international genealogy: established as Chakwal Cement, bought by Egypt's Orascom in 2005 and renamed Pakistan Cement, then folded into Lafarge in 2008 when Lafarge acquired Orascom's global cement operations. Bestway's purchase therefore did three things at once: it added a large, efficient plant in the heart of its own territory, removed a foreign competitor from the northern market, and lifted the group's total capacity to around eight million tonnes a year at the time, making it one of Pakistan's very largest cement producers.
Investment continued after the deal: waste-heat recovery power plants were built at Pakcem and inaugurated at the Hattar and Farooqia plants in 2015 — installations that capture kiln exhaust heat to generate electricity, cutting both energy bills and emissions — and a further greenfield expansion in the Haripur area was announced in 2017, adding another line of about 1.8 million tonnes within the following expansion cycle. Later group diversification, including cement-adjacent and entirely new ventures, has continued under the listed company's umbrella, but cement remains the core: BWCL's profits rise and fall with northern dispatches, retention prices and coal costs, as they have for thirty years.
How a cement company makes money
The formula is volume times margin, with energy in the middle. Revenue is tonnes dispatched multiplied by the retention price — what the producer keeps per bag after taxes and dealer margins. Costs are dominated by fuel and power: kilns burn coal (largely imported, priced in dollars, plus local and Afghan coal where usable), and grinding mills draw heavy electricity, part self-generated through captive and waste-heat plants. Raw materials are cheap but must sit near the plant — limestone reserves are a strategic asset measured in decades. Add packing, freight, maintenance and finance costs on expansion debt, and the result is a business with high fixed costs and fierce operating leverage: when construction demand booms, utilisation rises and profits surge; when demand slumps or coal spikes, the same kilns bleed cash. Exchange rates cut both ways — a weak rupee raises coal costs but also lifts the rupee price of exports and discourages competing imports.
Bestway's historical edges have been scale in one region, modern large lines, power self-sufficiency through waste-heat recovery, and a group parent accustomed to tight cost control from the wholesale trade. Its structural exposures are the mirror image: concentration in the northern market, dependence on imported fuel, and the industry's collective habit of adding capacity in booms that must then be sweated through busts.
What investors typically watch
Followers of BWCL read the standard cement dashboard: northern dispatches and industry utilisation from the manufacturers' association data; retention prices and the discipline of northern producers in holding them; coal prices and the fuel mix, including the share of cheaper local coal; power costs and waste-heat output; export volumes to Afghanistan, sensitive to border and political conditions; and balance-sheet leverage after each expansion wave, together with dividend payouts in strong years. Its weight in the KSE-100 — on the mechanics of which see how the KSE-100 is calculated and market capitalisation explained — places it alongside Lucky Cement among the sector's index heavyweights, though Lucky's southern plants and overseas ventures make the two quite different exposures.
This profile is educational content, not financial advice. Bestway Cement's lesson is about how industries are actually built in Pakistan: not only by local industrial houses, but by diaspora groups willing to commit hundreds of millions of dollars, plant by plant and deal by deal, over decades. The background toolkit for reading its results sits at Aktzien Learn.
Two features of Bestway's approach repay attention from students of the industry. The first is its treatment of energy as a strategic weapon rather than a utility bill. Cement kilns devour fuel, and Pakistani producers have been whipsawed by imported-coal prices, rupee falls and grid shortages. Bestway's repeated investment in waste-heat recovery — generating power from exhaust gases that would otherwise be wasted — together with captive generation, attacks the second-largest cost line permanently rather than negotiating it annually, and the group's public reporting has consistently framed these plants as both cost and environmental measures. The second is cluster discipline. Rather than scattering plants across Pakistan, Bestway densified one region: Hattar and Farooqia in the northwest, Chakwal and Kallar Kahar in the Potohar, close enough to share limestone logistics, technical teams and market intelligence, and to present dealers in any northern city with several plants' worth of supply security. The risk of the strategy is concentration — a northern downturn or a regional rival's price war hits everything at once — but the group's three decades suggest it prefers depth it understands to breadth it does not. That same instinct, transplanted from British cash-and-carry wholesaling, where a few huge depots serve defined territories superbly, is recognisable in the cement map: this is a wholesaler's idea of manufacturing, built at industrial scale.
The group's philanthropy and public presence in Pakistan form part of the context in which the cement company operates. The Bestway Foundation has funded education and health causes in Pakistan for decades, and the group's principals are fixtures of the country's business diplomacy — knighted and ennobled in Britain, decorated and received in Pakistan. For BWCL itself, the more concrete legacy is employment and industrial depth in districts — Haripur, Chakwal, Kallar Kahar — where a large modern plant anchors suppliers, transporters and dealers far beyond its own payroll. Cement plants are also long-lived neighbours: quarries, dust, trucks and water use make them subjects of local scrutiny, and the company's environmental reporting and community spending belong in any complete reading of its annual reports. None of this softens the commodity reality of the business — in a price war, tonnes and rupees decide — but it explains why this particular producer's decisions are watched in two capitals, and why its parent has historically been willing to fund it through cycles that purely local owners might have exited.
That record — privatisation purchase, greenfield builder and foreign-exit buyer in a single decade — has few parallels in Pakistani industry, and it is the foundation on which the listed company's present scale rests.
Key takeaway: Bestway Cement grew from a single 1995 plant at Hattar into a northern heavyweight by alternating greenfield expansions at Chakwal with acquisitions — Mustehkam in 2005 and Lafarge Pakistan (Pakcem) in 2014 — under a British-Pakistani parent built by Sir Anwar Pervez.
