The local banking sector has announced a voluntary 3% reduction in the rate of return for the export sector, bringing the markup rate under the Export Refinance Facility down to 4.5%. The move is expected to lower business costs for exporters and help boost foreign exchange earnings. Commercial banks have implemented the relief for exporters on all new loans as well as rollover loans, with the
Pakistan's foreign exchange reserves held by the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) posted a modest increase during the week ended February 6, 2026, according to data released on Thursday. The SBP's FX reserves rose by $21 million on a weekly basis to $16.18 billion. Meanwhile, the country's total liquid foreign reserves stood at $21.37 billion. Of this, the net foreign reserves held by commercial ba
Pakistan's startup ecosystem, once a headline-grabbing post-Covid-19 success story that attracted aggressive venture capital chasing growth and buzzworthy "disruption," is now entering a more cautious and structurally different phase. With investors increasingly prioritising risk-adjusted returns and shifting capital towards safer assets such as gold, the funding landscape is undergoing a trans
The fragile external financing system of Pakistan is one of the main reasons for the weak economic structure of the country, as heavy reliance on foreign loans continues to expose the economy to sudden shocks, business leaders and economists said. They added that the external debt profile remains tilted towards short-term borrowing, leaving little room for policy mistakes. "The government must
Asian shares retreated from record highs on Friday as worries about shrinking margins in the tech sector hit the likes of Apple, driving investors into safe-haven bonds ahead of key US inflation data. Overnight on Wall Street, the technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite tumbled 2% after Cisco Systems posted quarterly adjusted gross margin below estimates as costs of memory chips surged. That drove it