KARACHI: For three-quarters of a century, one of the most familiar names in Pakistani industry was three letters long: ICI. The soda ash plant at Khewra, the polyester fibre works, the pharmaceutical and agrochemical brands — all carried the identity of Imperial Chemical Industries, the British chemicals giant. In 2022 the company formally became Lucky Core Industries, LCI on the Pakistan Stock Exchange, completing a journey that began with a wartime soda ash project in 1944, passed through British ownership and a Dutch takeover, and ended in the hands of Pakistan's Yunus Brothers Group. The rename closed one era; the businesses inside — soda ash, polyester, pharmaceuticals, animal health, chemicals and agri-sciences — remain a cross-section of Pakistani manufacturing in a single listed company.
Origins: soda ash at Khewra
The company's roots lie in the Khewra salt range in Punjab, where rock salt and limestone — the two raw materials of soda ash — sit practically side by side. The enterprise was established in 1944 as the Khewra Soda Ash Company, building a plant with an initial capacity of about 18,000 tonnes a year next to those deposits. The project's prehistory was bumpier than the founding date suggests: construction had begun in the late 1930s under the Alkali Chemical Corporation of India, but the Second World War interrupted it — company lore, recorded in its histories, tells of essential equipment lost when a German U-boat torpedoed the ship carrying it. Production nevertheless began in the mid-1940s, and after independence the business took the name its parent made famous: ICI Pakistan, part of the global Imperial Chemical Industries group headquartered in Britain.
Soda ash is an unglamorous chemical with an indispensable customer list — it is a core input for glass, detergents and other chemicals — and the Khewra works gave the young Pakistan a domestic source of a material it would otherwise have imported entirely. The plant's position beside both of its raw materials is a geological endowment few chemical businesses anywhere enjoy: the salt comes from one of the world's great salt ranges and the limestone from the same hills, so the works' fundamental cost advantage is written into the landscape rather than negotiated in a market. Over the following decades the company widened far beyond Khewra. The modern ICI Pakistan took formal shape on 1 April 1987, when three group companies — Paintex, ICI Pakistan Manufacturers and Imperial Chemical Industries' local entity — were amalgamated into a single ICI Pakistan Limited. By then the portfolio already spanned the businesses that still define it: polyester staple fibre for the textile industry, pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals and seeds, animal health products, and a general chemicals trading and manufacturing operation, alongside the original soda ash. One major piece was later separated: the pure terephthalic acid (PTA) business was demerged in 2000 into what became Pakistan PTA — a separation whose story continues in the profile of Lotte Chemical Pakistan in this series, and a reminder of how often Pakistani chemical assets have been rearranged between owners.
From London to Amsterdam to Karachi: the ownership carousel
For most of its life ICI Pakistan answered, ultimately, to London. That changed through events an ocean away: in 2008 the Dutch coatings group AkzoNobel acquired Imperial Chemical Industries worldwide, and ICI Pakistan passed into Dutch ownership as a by-product of a global deal in which Pakistan was a footnote. The local business continued — same plants, same brands — but its strategic home had moved, and AkzoNobel's focus lay in paints and speciality coatings rather than in the broad chemicals portfolio ICI Pakistan represented.
The decisive change came in 2012, when the Yunus Brothers Group — the Karachi-based group built by the Tabba family around Lucky Cement — acquired the majority shareholding in ICI Pakistan. The purchase was a statement of intent by one of Pakistan's most ambitious groups: a diversified, professionally managed chemicals house, with market-leading positions in several niches, fitted the group's pattern of buying strong industrial franchises and running them for expansion. Under Yunus Brothers ownership the company invested across its divisions, expanded soda ash capacity at Khewra in stages, grew its pharmaceutical and agri-sciences footprints through product launches and acquisitions, and professionalised under the Lucky umbrella while keeping the ICI name that customers knew — for a decade. Majority ownership today sits with Lucky Cement, the group's flagship, alongside other group textile companies, making LCI a listed subsidiary inside a listed parent's empire — the relationship explored from the other side in our profile of Lucky Cement.
2022: the name catches up with the ownership
Shareholders approved the change of name from ICI Pakistan Limited to Lucky Core Industries Limited at the annual general meeting on 27 September 2022, with the new identity taking effect towards the end of that calendar year. The logic was straightforward: the ICI name belonged to a former parent's heritage, the company's shares had traded for a decade under Lucky ownership, and the group wanted its chemicals flagship branded as part of its own core — "Lucky Core" signalling both parentage and centrality. For long-time market participants the ticker change took some adjusting; ICI had been a fixture of the Karachi exchange's board for generations. But the rename is a useful teaching example of a general point: a listed company's name is a marketing and ownership signal, not the business itself. The Khewra kilns, the fibre plant and the pharma brands did not change the day the letterhead did.
Five businesses under one roof
LCI describes itself through its segments, and each deserves a line, because the diversification is the investment story. Soda ash, still made at Khewra from local salt and limestone, supplies glassmakers, detergent manufacturers and chemical processors, and gives the company a resource-anchored, hard-to-replicate core. Polyester — polymer and staple fibre produced near Lahore — feeds Pakistan's textile mills, tying this segment's fortunes to the textile cycle and to the price of its petrochemical inputs, including the PTA made by its former sister business at Port Qasim. Pharmaceuticals manufactures and markets medicines, a demand stream driven by population and healthcare spending rather than by industrial cycles. Animal health sells veterinary medicines for Pakistan's large livestock and poultry sectors. And the chemicals and agri-sciences operations trade and formulate crop-protection products, seeds and industrial chemicals. The company has also held interests adjacent to the core, including infant-formula manufacturing through a joint venture with Japan's Morinaga, part of which it agreed to divest in 2022 while retaining a minority stake. A further thread in the modern portfolio is energy itself: the group built captive power capacity to serve its plants, organised through a dedicated power subsidiary, because for a chemicals manufacturer in Pakistan electricity is not a utility bill but a production input whose reliability decides plant uptime. Each of these side-steps follows the same pattern — secure an input, a registration or a channel that the core businesses depend on — and together they explain why LCI's annual report reads less like a single factory's accounts and more like a small industrial economy, with internal trade between segments that consolidation then has to untangle for the reader.
Our sector guide to chemical stocks on the PSX shows how unusual that breadth is: most listed chemical names are single-product companies riding one commodity spread, whereas LCI is a portfolio. Portfolio economics cut both ways — a weak year in polyester can be cushioned by pharmaceuticals, but no single boom lifts the whole company the way it lifts a pure-play.
How LCI makes money
Across segments, the common mechanics are those of a manufacturer with pricing power in niches. Soda ash earns the spread between a domestically-set price — disciplined by the cost of importing the same chemical — and the cost of mining, energy and freight from an inland plant. Polyester earns a conversion margin over petrochemical feedstock costs that are set globally and in dollars, which makes it the most commodity-exposed of the businesses. Pharmaceuticals and animal health earn brand and distribution margins: registrations, medical and veterinary sales networks, and trusted names support prices above pure manufacturing cost, at the price of regulatory oversight of drug pricing. Agri-sciences earns seasonal margins tied to planting decisions and farm incomes. Threaded through all of it are the group's advantages: shared services, a strong balance sheet inherited from decades of profitable operation, and a parent willing to fund capacity expansions — soda ash debottlenecking at Khewra being the recurring example — that a standalone company might have deferred.
The ICI decades: building a national institution
Between the Khewra founding and the Yunus Brothers era lies the long middle of the company's life, and it deserves its own telling, because the institution the Tabba family bought in 2012 was built then. Under the ICI flag the company behaved the way the local arms of great multinationals were expected to: it imported British management systems, technical standards and training culture, and applied them to Pakistani raw materials and markets. The soda ash works at Khewra expanded in stages from their wartime beginnings into one of the region's significant plants. The polyester business brought a new industry into being downstream of petrochemicals, giving Pakistan's weavers a domestic synthetic fibre when the alternative was total import dependence. The pharmaceuticals and agrochemicals operations built the regulatory dossiers, brands and field forces — medical representatives, agronomists, veterinary networks — that remain among the company's most durable assets, because distribution trust in medicines and farm inputs compounds over decades and cannot be bought quickly by a new entrant. The 1987 amalgamation that created the modern ICI Pakistan Limited was the era's tidying act, folding the group's overlapping local companies into one listed vehicle.
That inheritance explains two features of the company today that pure financial analysis can miss. The first is its institutional depth: few Pakistani manufacturers can match the breadth of regulatory licences, product registrations and technical documentation a former ICI subsidiary carries, and in pharmaceuticals especially, those registrations are the business. The second is the talent tradition — the company was for generations a finishing school for Pakistani professional managers, and the market's respect for its bench is part of what a buyer acquires. When the Yunus Brothers took control, they were explicit in their early presentations about building on that legacy rather than replacing it: the phrase the group used was unleashing the potential of an already well-run company. The decade since — expansion at Khewra, portfolio additions in life sciences, and eventually the Lucky Core rename — is best read as the second founder era of a company whose first founders were a salt range, a war-interrupted construction site and a British industrial empire.
What investors typically watch
Watchers of LCI follow the segments separately rather than the headline alone. In soda ash: capacity utilisation, expansion milestones and import competition. In polyester: the feedstock spread and textile demand, including competition from imported fibre. In pharmaceuticals: regulatory decisions on pricing, new product launches and the integration of acquired brands. Across the group: energy costs, which touch every plant; the dividend, historically a feature of the old ICI's shareholder proposition; and any portfolio moves — acquisitions or divestments — through which the Yunus Brothers reshape the mix. The holding structure itself gets attention too: LCI's seat in the KSE-100 rests on the free-float market capitalisation mechanics explained in our index guides, and its majority parentage means the free float is a minority of the shares even though the company's absolute size is considerable.
From Khewra Soda Ash Company to ICI Pakistan to Lucky Core Industries, the company's three names record three eras of Pakistani capitalism — colonial-era industrialisation, the multinational decades, and the rise of domestic groups buying back the commanding heights. This article is educational content, not financial advice. The Aktzien learning library holds the sector guides and explainers linked here for readers following the story further.
Key takeaway: LCI began in 1944 as a soda ash works beside the Khewra salt range, spent decades as ICI Pakistan under British and then Dutch ownership, was bought by the Yunus Brothers Group in 2012 and renamed Lucky Core Industries in 2022 — a diversified house spanning soda ash, polyester, pharmaceuticals, animal health and agri-sciences.
