ISLAMABAD: DealCart, a Pakistani e-commerce startup focused on transforming the way consumers access essential goods, has successfully raised $3 million in a funding round led by leading Middle East investment fund, Shorooq Partners, the startup said on Friday.
DealCart aims to provide affordable daily essential products to underserved communities in Pakistan through a gamified and interactive platform. The startup helps unlock more value by enabling users to “buy together and save together,” sourcing products directly from manufacturers and collaborating with locally manufactured brands.
Founded in 2017, Shorooq Partners is a leading alternative investment manager across the Middle East and North Africa region, with its venture capital and private credit funds investing in innovative technology companies. The firm has built deep sectoral expertise in fintech, platforms, software, gaming, and Web3.0, and has backed market-leading disruptors.
The funding round also saw participation from Sturgeon Capital, 500 Global, Evolution VC, Rayn Capital and Khyber Venture Partners, and the capital infusion will help DealCart expand its reach and provide affordable essential goods to low- and middle-income consumers across Pakistan, according to the e-commerce startup.
“This investment from Shorooq Partners is a testament to the potential of DealCart to revolutionize the way Pakistani consumers shop for essentials,” DealCart founders Haider Raza and Ammar Naveed said in a statement. “Our goal is to make everyday necessities more affordable and accessible, and this funding will help us get closer to that vision.”
Pakistan’s has for months been facing high inflation, which soared past 30 percent in 2023, putting significant financial strain on a majority of households.
DealCart aims to ease this financial burden by sourcing products directly from manufacturers and targets consumers who spend about 50 to 60 percent of their income on groceries and essentials, helping them save more and invest in a better future. The company also targets a digitally sophisticated younger population that prefers online retail spaces, according to the statement.
Despite rapid e-commerce growth in neighboring India, Pakistan’s e-commerce sector has lagged and to boost digital transactions and stimulate e-commerce, the State Bank of Pakistan introduced RAAST, an online instant payment platform, that has positioned DealCart to address market gaps.
“DealCart has identified a market gap and is developing a distinctive approach to social commerce and providing affordable essentials to most consumers, an approach that aligns with our mission to support market-leading disruptors,” said Omer Zabit, principal at Shorooq Partners.
“We believe this investment will enable DealCart to scale rapidly and significantly impact the lives of millions in Pakistan.”
Pakistan’s DealCart raises $3 mln in funding round led by prominent Middle East investment fund
https://arab.news/jzwcd
Pakistan’s DealCart raises $3 mln in funding round led by prominent Middle East investment fund
- DealCart aims to provide affordable daily essential products to underserved communities in Pakistan through a gamified and interactive platform
- The Pakistani startup helps unlock more value by sourcing products directly from manufacturers and collaborating with locally manufactured brands
Named after famed cinema, Karachi street now hub of used goods and fashion fakes
- Light House street named after pre-partition cinema that screened famous movies like ‘Koel,’ ‘Josh’ and ‘Umrao Jaan Ada’
- Light House cinema entertained movie buffs until 1980, after which area gradually transformed into a business center
KARACHI: Looking for used clothes and shoes, bags and toys for your children or knock-offs from coveted fashion brands?
Head to Light House, a famous street off MA Jinnah Road in Pakistan’s commercial hub of Karachi where all these items are available for cheap only if you’re willing to trudge through rows of stalls and shops and piles upon piles of goods on sale.
“When I think of Light House, I think of it as the place where I can get imported items I need within a normal price range,” Muhammad Jehangir, a 25-year-old customer visiting the market from Peshawar, told Arab News.
“If you want to buy anything, Light House in Karachi is the best place. You can find everything here,” he added, as he showed off his purchase: a pair of shoes for around $100 that would have cost him up to five times more if purchased new:
“The cheapest shoes are available here as well as shoes imported from other countries.”
While a global crackdown on counterfeit goods has pushed fakes into back rooms, in Asia sales are more blatant with markets from Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur to Bangkok and Beijing filled with fake brands including Prada, Burberry and Louis Vuitton. In Karachi, Light House is the hub of the illicit trade.
But the street was not always a center for second-hand merchandise and fashion fakes. Before the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, it was a famed cinema hub of Karachi.
“So, this area is famous because of Light House cinema. Light House Cinema dates back to before the partition, it was named Light House in 1946,” said Iqbal A. Rehman Mandvia, who has authored a book, ‘Is Dasht Me Ik Shehr tha,’ on Karachi.
“Before that, it was called Globe Cinema. It became Light House in 1946 and remained here until 1980, after which it became a business center.”
Now the area was known as a landa bazaar, or a market for second-hand clothes, Mandvia said.
Across the road from the cinema stood the now defunct Café Lasani, known for decades for its famous chicken tikka.
“It was a golden era,” Mandvia said, remembering famous films he had watched at Light House.
“I watched the movie ‘Josh’ here, followed by ‘Umrao Jaan Ada’ … Light House was an air-conditioned cinema that screened good films and the area was nice too.”
Muhammad Sabir, whose grandfather bought several shops in the area in 1948, recalled that the main attraction was once the movie theater.
“Noor Jehan’s film ‘Koel’ was playing, and people broke down the doors of the cinema in their quest to get tickets,” he said as he showed an imported pair of jeans to a customer at his shop.
Sabir, now 76, had just been born when his grandfather bought the shops and initially ran grocery stores, tailoring shops and laundry services there before switching over to selling used goods.
“We also changed our business and moved into the field of second-hand clothing,” he added.
And now that’s why customers throng the market.
“When we hear about Light House, we think of it as a place where we can find unique and affordable items at cheap prices that come from abroad,” Sonia, a regular customer who only gave her first name, told Arab News, showing off three toys she had purchased for her children for Rs100 ($0.36) a piece.
“They are very different and good. You can find everything here, like very good toys and branded shoes that have been used once or twice, but you can also find new ones.”
Fire erupts at Pakistan Stock Exchange, no loss of life or injury reported
- Video footage showed flames and smoke billowing from fourth floor of building in Karachi
- Trading at country’s largest bourse resumes after being suspended for two hours due to fire
KARACHI: Firefighters were busy dousing flames at the Pakistan Stock Exchange building in Karachi on Monday after a fire erupted on the fourth floor, a rescue service confirmed.
No loss of life or injury has so far been reported in the incident, Rescue 1122 Sindh said in a statement. As per local media reports, people inside the stock exchange were evacuated from the premises after the fire erupted.
“Rescue 1122’s fire and rescue team were dispatched to the venue with two fire brigade trucks as soon as they received information [about the fire],” the rescue service said.
Video footage shared widely showed flames and smoke billowing from the fourth floor of the Pakistan Stock Exchange building. According to local media reports, trading at the Pakistan Stock Exchange was suspended after the fire broke out.
The country’s largest bourse is located on I. I. Chundrigar Road, also known as Pakistan’s Wall Street, the city’s main commercial street in a high-security zone close to the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) and the Central Police Office.
Many offices of private banks, commercial enterprises, and the head office of Karachi Port Trust (KPT) are in close vicinity.
Pakistan PM to announce ‘big package’ for farmers in day-long visit to Quetta today
- PM Sharif to meet Balochistan chief minister, governor and lawmakers in day-long trip today, says PMO
- Balochistan is Pakistan’s largest province by size yet its most backward one by most economic indicators
Islamabad: Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif arrived in the southwestern city of Quetta today, Monday, where he will announce a “big package” for farmers and also meet Balochistan’s provincial leadership, his office confirmed.
Pakistan’s restive Balochistan province, which shares porous borders with Afghanistan and Iran, has been wracked by an insurgency launched by ethnic Baloch militants since decades. These Baloch nationalists have long accused the Pakistani government of monopolizing profits from Balochistan’s abundant natural resources, saying it has led to political marginalization and economic exploitation. The state denies these allegations.
The province, Pakistan’s largest in terms of size yet its most backward by almost all economic indicators, was battered by flash floods when torrential rains wreaked havoc in March this year. Torrential floods inundated roads in Kharan and Kech districts and inflicted misery on farmers, who had to suffer economic hardship when a large number of their crops were washed away.
“Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has arrived in Quetta for a day-long visit,” the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) said in a statement, adding that he was received by Governor Sheikh Jaffar Khan and Chief Minister Sarfraz Bugti upon his arrival.
“The prime minister will also announce a big package on behalf of the federal and Balochistan government for the development and prosperity of Balochistan’s farmers,” the PMO said.
The prime minister is being accompanied by federal ministers Azam Nazeer Tarar, Awais Khan Laghari, Ataullah Tarar, Jam Kamal Khan and minister of state Ali Pervaiz Malik. Sharif’s office said he is also expected to meet the provincial assembly’s lawmakers as well during his visit.
On Sunday, the Pakistani prime minister undertook a day-long trip to Pakistan’s commercial and industrial hub Karachi, where he met members of the business community and inspected port operations. Sharif directed authorities to improve transportation of goods at the Karachi port, noting that Pakistan held a key geographical position in the region and provided the most convenient sea trade route for the Central Asian states.
The prime minister’s visit to the militancy-hit province also takes place as the government seeks to drum up support for a new military operation it announced last month titled “Operation Azm-e-Istehkam” or Resolve for Stability.
The government announced the operation last month after a meeting of the Central Apex Committee on the National Action Plan (NAP) attended by senior military leaders and top government officials from all provinces, including the PTI-backed Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Chief Minister Ali Amin Gandapur.
Pakistan’s opposition parties criticized the government’s move, accusing it of not taking lawmakers into confidence over the matter. PM Sharif subsequently clarified the operation would not be launched before it is debated in parliament, adding that Azm-e-Istehkam would only mobilize military operations that have already been launched against militants and aim to eliminate them from the country for good.
‘Operation Ashura’: Pakistan’s national airline launches special flights to Najaf for Muharram
- Iraq’s Najaf and Karbala cities hold special significance for Shia Muslims, who visit them in Muharram to pay tribute to Imam Hussain
- “Operation Ashura” to provide seamless travel experience to pilgrims, return flights from Najaf to begin from July 20, says state media
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s national airline has launched special flights to Iraq’s Najaf city to provide a seamless travel experience to pilgrims during the Islamic month of Muharram, state broadcaster Radio Pakistan reported on Sunday.
Iraqi cities of Najaf and Karbala hold tremendous significance for Shia Muslims around the world, many of whom travel to these cities during the first two months of Islamic lunar calendar to recall the sacrifices made by Imam Hussain, the grandson of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him).
“Pakistan International Airlines has launched special flights for Najaf to facilitate pilgrims during Muharram,” Radio Pakistan said in a report. “The flights operation called ‘Operation Ashura’ is designed to provide a seamless travel experience for pilgrims during this significant period of religious observance.”
The state broadcaster said return flights from Najaf will begin on July 20.
Pakistan’s central moon-sighting committee met on Saturday in the southwestern city of Quetta to spot the Muharram crescent. The Ruet-e-Hilal Committee (RHC) announced that Pakistan would observe the first of Muharram on July 8 while Ashura, which marks the martyrdom of Hussian, would be observed on July 17.
Ashura, which falls on Muharram 10 every year, sees hundreds of thousands of Shia Muslims take part in religious gatherings and processions in Pakistan to mourn Hussain’s passing. These processions and gatherings take place amid tight security, as militant groups in Pakistan have often targeted them in the past and killed of hundreds of people.
Pakistan’s largest Punjab province has proposed a ban on all social media platforms from Muharram 6-11 to ensure proper security measures, provincial information minister Azma Bukhari said on Friday.
The measure was aimed at protecting Shia Muslims from sectarian violence and control the spread of hate speech and misinformation, the provincial government wrote in a letter to Pakistan’s interior ministry last week.
Thousands in Pakistan treated for heat stroke last month as June breaks global record
- Last month was hottest June on record, exacerbating fears 2024 could be warmest year on record
- Most of the heat is from long-term warming from greenhouse gases, say scientists and meteorologists
Earth’s more than year-long streak of record-shattering hot months kept on simmering through June, according to the European climate service Copernicus.
There’s hope that the planet will soon see an end to the record-setting part of the heat streak, but not the climate chaos that has come with it, scientists said.
The global temperature in June was record warm for the 13th straight month and it marked the 12th straight month that the world was 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than pre-industrial times, Copernicus said in an early Monday announcement.
“It’s a stark warning that we are getting closer to this very important limit set by the Paris Agreement,” Copernicus senior climate scientist Nicolas Julien said in an interview. “The global temperature continues to increase. It has at a rapid pace.”
That 1.5 degree temperature mark is important because that’s the warming limit nearly all the countries in the world agreed upon in the 2015 Paris climate agreement, though Julien and other meteorologists have said the threshold won’t be crossed until there’s long-term duration of the extended heat — as much as 20 or 30 years.
“This is more than a statistical oddity and it highlights a continuing shift in our climate,” Copernicus Director Carlo Buontempo said in a statement.
The globe for June 2024 averaged 62 degrees Fahrenheit (16.66 degrees Celsius), which is 1.2 degrees (0.67 Celsius) above the 30-year average for the month, according to Copernicus. It broke the record for hottest June, set a year earlier, by a quarter of a degree (0.14 degrees Celsius) and is the third-hottest of any month recorded in Copernicus records, which goes back to 1940, behind only last July and last August.
It’s not that records are being broken monthly but they are being “shattered by very substantial margins over the past 13 months,” Julien said.
“How bad is this?” asked Texas A&M University climate scientist Andrew Dessler, who wasn’t part of the report. “For the rich and for right now, it’s an expensive inconvenience. For the poor it’s suffering. In the future the amount of wealth you have to have to merely be inconvenienced will increase until most people are suffering.”
Even without hitting the long-term 1.5-degree threshold, “we have seen the consequences of climate change, these extreme climate events,” Julien said — meaning worsening floods, storms, droughts and heat waves.
June’s heat hit extra hard in southeast Europe, Turkiye, eastern Canada, the western United States and Mexico, Brazil, northern Siberia, the Middle East, northern Africa and western Antarctica, according to Copernicus. Doctors had to treat thousands of heatstroke victims in Pakistan last month as temperatures hit 117 (47 degrees Celsius).
June was also the 15th straight month that the world’s oceans, more than two-thirds of Earth’s surface, have broken heat records, according to Copernicus data.
Most of this heat is from long-term warming from greenhouse gases emitted by the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, Julien and other meteorologists said. An overwhelming amount of the heat energy trapped by human-caused climate change goes directly into the ocean and those oceans take longer to warm and cool.
The natural cycle of El Ninos and La Ninas, which are warming and cooling of the central Pacific that change weather worldwide, also plays a role. El Ninos tend to spike global temperature records and the strong El Nino that formed last year ended in June.
Another factor is that the air over Atlantic shipping channels is cleaner because of marine shipping regulations that reduce traditional air pollution particles, such as sulfur, that cause a bit of cooling, scientists said. That slightly masks the much larger warming effect of greenhouse gases. That “masking effect got smaller and it would temporarily increase the rate of warming” that is already caused by greenhouse gases, said Tianle Yuan, a climate scientist for NASA and the University of Maryland Baltimore Campus who led a study on the effects of shipping regulations.
Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather, of the tech company Stripes and the Berkeley Earth climate-monitoring group, said in a post on X that with all six months this year seeing record heat, “that there is an approximately 95 percent chance that 2024 beats 2023 to be the warmest year since global surface temperature records began in the mid-1800s.”
Copernicus hasn’t computed the odds of that yet, Julien said. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration last month gave it a 50 percent chance.
Global daily average temperatures in late June and early July, while still hot, were not as warm as last year, Julien said.
“It is likely, I would say, that July 2024 will be colder than July 2023 and this streak will end,” Julien said. “It’s still not certain. Things can change.”
Andrew Weaver, a climate scientist at the University of Victoria, said the data show Earth is on track for 3 degrees Celsius of warming if emissions aren’t urgently curtailed. And he feared that an end to the streak of record hot months and the arrival of winter’s snows will mean “people will soon forget” about the danger.
“Our world is in crisis,” said University of Wisconsin climate scientist Andrea Dutton. “Perhaps you are feeling that crisis today — those who live in the path of Beryl are experiencing a hurricane that is fueled by an extremely warm ocean that has given rise to a new era of tropical storms that can intensify rapidly into deadly and costly major hurricanes. Even if you are not in crisis today, each temperature record we set means that it is more likely that climate change will bring crisis to your doorstep or to your loved ones.”
Copernicus uses billions of measurements from satellites, ships, aircraft and weather stations around the world and then reanalyzes it with computer simulations. Several other countries’ science agencies — including NOAA and NASA — also come up with monthly climate calculations, but they take longer, go back further in time and don’t use computer simulations.
