RAWALPINDI/MIRPUR – Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD) — one of Pakistan’s oldest jihad startups — has announced to shut its operation in the country citing “global recession and the recent downturn in capital”. The j-commerce startup had already curtailed its operations in several cities in recent years.
“While the global recession and recent downturn in the capital have affected jihadist activity across the board, it has had a devastating impact on JuD and rendered its shut-down inevitable,” the company said in a statement, announcing that its operations will shut down permanently.
The company termed the development an “extremely taxing decision” that impacts a large set of stakeholders and an emerging jihad ecosystem.
In recent years, it said, JuD has proven to be one of the most resilient and agile startups coming out of emerging jihad markets and the company was able to navigate the FATF crisis, pivoting into j-commerce and building scale in a new domain.
The company said that with the onset of the FATF-led recession it “restructured” its business operations and in response to the situation adapted a political mainstreaming instructed by the investors.
“With the above adaptations, JuD was able to achieve order-level profitability, maintain reasonable scale, and reduce financial burn,” the company said.
Talking exclusively with The Dependent, the country’s leading j-commerce figure, Hafiz Saeed, the CEO of JuD, said the constant rebranding wasn’t a sustainable business model.
“Of course, it meant that the business kept running. But even with the same personnel in leadership positions, changing the company’s name every few years, after having spent time and energy building the brand, naturally takes its toll on the sustainability of the operations,” Saeed said.
However, the JuD CEO insisted that despite there being multiple factors behind the shutdown the primary reason remained the downtown in the capital.
“The actual capital that is, Rawalpindi, because the investors, and the investors of our investors, have all taken a hit in recent years.”
