Pakistan Rising: Bazaar's Growth Story (A)

The case opens in September 2021 as Hamza Jawaid and Saad Jangda, co-founders of Bazaar technologies (Bazaar), the Pakistani high growth B2B e-commerce marketplace, are contemplating whether the year-and-a half old startup should also venture into offering financing to its customers, the thousands of mom-and-pop stores around Pakistan. Since its founding in mid 2020, the company has been growing its core business full throttle and also launched a digital ledger app to help with customer acquisition. Meanwhile, the co-founders are growing the team and geographically expanding Bazaar’s operations beyond Karachi. Jawaid and Jangda need to weigh the pros and cons of branching out to financing and decide, with so much going on, whether this is the right time for such a move.

The case provides a background on Pakistan, its retail and e-commerce space to then talk about Bazaar’s founding story and its founders’ ambitious mission to create a generational story in and for Pakistan. The case then talks about the company’s pillars: technology, warehousing and logistics, and culture in detail and provides details on its day-to-day operations. Next, the case chronicles the company’s growth both product -wise and geographically.

Bazaar is trying to take a stake and solidify its place in the booming $170 billion retail market in the world’s fifth-most populous nation which is yet to see much deployment of technology, and is in hypergrowth mode with a number of competing priorities. The co-founders need to decide if venturing into financing now is a good idea and whether it would take away from the company’s sharp focus on the B2B business and its culture that the co-founders so passionately built. The decision is made more complicated, because the company has the funds to deploy and many think that financing will also fuel the growth of the core business.