LocationsSustaining Businesses in Turbulent Times:
Resilience Is Built Before It Is Needed
By Dr. Zeelaf Munir | Managing Director & CEO, EBM
Pakistan has rarely lacked reform blueprints. What has defeated successive governments is the harder task of turning well-understood intentions into reforms that actually take hold.
There are economies where the last five years have been an education in disruption, and others where disruption has never really been news. Pakistan belongs to the second category. Those of us who have spent years in manufacturing have managed plants through currency depreciation, gas curtailment, floods that cut routes to the market, and commodity prices that changed between placing an order and receiving it.
Over time, I have learned that the businesses which endure are not necessarily those that respond most dramatically when a crisis arrives. More often, they are the ones that continued investing when nothing appeared to be going wrong.
This matters because the pressures on manufacturers no longer arrive one at a time. Economic conditions can change faster than planning cycles allow. Technology continues to raise expectations of what manufacturers should be able to do. Decisions taken in distant capitals affect markets and supply chains, while climate events interrupt agriculture, logistics, and production with increasing regularity. A business may be equipped to manage any one of these pressures. Managing several at once requires something more.
My own view is that resilience cannot be assembled after a crisis has begun. It develops gradually through three forms of investment: alternatives built into the supply chain, technology that allows a business to adapt, and resilient people who know what to do when the usual answers no longer apply.
The first investment is in more than one source. Depending on a single supplier may offer immediate efficiencies, but it can expose an entire operation when that source is interrupted. In manufacturing, qualifying an alternative is rarely an exciting decision. It involves trials, specifications, regulatory approvals, and shelf-life testing, often before the business receives any immediate benefit. Maintaining the relationship may also require regular audits and minimum volumes.
These costs can appear unnecessary until the primary source is interrupted. McKinsey’s 2026 research describes a consumer-goods company that diversified sourcing across three continents, reducing stockouts and emergency logistics costs while releasing working capital. The apparent savings from concentration must therefore be considered alongside the cost of disruption.
Diversification should also include developing capable local suppliers wherever this is commercially and technically feasible. Localization cannot remove every external dependency, nor should it come at the expense of quality or competitiveness. It can, however, shorten supply chains, create employment, and retain more value within Pakistan. Developing that capability requires patience from both manufacturers and suppliers, but it strengthens more than one business. It strengthens the wider industrial base on which businesses depend.
The second investment is in technology that keeps the business relevant. Technology determines whether a plant can respond to changes in cost, demand, or product specifications, or whether it can only absorb them. The leadership challenge is deciding where investment will create real operating capability rather than simply following what is currently receiving attention.
McKinsey’s 2025 research found that while 88 percent of organizations used artificial intelligence in at least one function, only about a third had begun scaling it across the enterprise. At the same time, the share of firms planning major investment in digital supply-chain systems fell from 47 percent to 25 percent.
The contrast is important. Businesses can be drawn towards the technology everyone is discussing while postponing investment in the less visible systems, equipment, and data infrastructure that their operations actually need. The consequences of postponement may not be apparent immediately. They emerge later, when the business needs to change a product, control a rising cost, or respond quickly to a new market requirement and discovers that its systems cannot keep pace.
The third, and for me the most important investment, is in people. Equipment can be acquired and suppliers can be qualified, but the judgement held within an experienced team takes years to develop. The ability to solve an unfamiliar problem at speed rests with people who understand the operation and have been given opportunities to learn beyond the limits of their immediate roles.
Retaining a workforce through a downturn can be difficult when every cost is under review. Yet those same people carry the institutional knowledge that allows a company to recover and expand when conditions improve. Businesses that protect their capabilities through difficult cycles are also better placed to create employment when growth returns. In an economy where formal employment remains scarce, that continuity is worth considerably more than its immediate payroll cost.
The challenge is not recognizing the value of these investments. It is continuing to fund them when their immediate returns are difficult to demonstrate. No organization records a disruption that did not happen. A stockout prevented by a second supplier does not appear as revenue earned. Training remains visible in the operating budget, while the stoppage it prevented appears nowhere. Maintenance is recorded as expenditure, but the equipment failure it averted is not.
This makes resilience easy to postpone. Research also suggests that, as the memory of the pandemic faded, many companies allowed some of the capabilities built during that period to weaken. Awareness of risks beyond immediate suppliers declined through 2023 and 2024 and has not returned to 2022 levels. This points to a familiar pattern: resilience is treated as a temporary response, funded while the last crisis remains fresh and reconsidered once normality appears to return.
But protection is only part of what resilience provides. Disruption damages markets, but it can also reorder them. The opportunities created by that change are usually brief. A competitor’s supply may fail and a retailer may need a replacement within weeks. An export market may open but require certification, production capacity, and compliant shelf life within a fixed period.
A business can respond only if the necessary capability already exists. Product trials, approvals, testing, and production cannot all begin after the opportunity has appeared. This is why resilience should not be seen simply as insurance against disruption. It also gives businesses the ability to innovate and act when markets change.
The payback period can be long. After the 2011 earthquake in Japan, Toyota required suppliers to maintain months of semiconductor inventory. For almost a decade, that decision could have appeared to be dead capital. When the global chip shortage arrived, Toyota was able to sustain production longer than many competitors. It eventually reduced output as well, because no company was completely protected, but it absorbed the initial shock better because of a decision made years before the nature of the next disruption was known.
The same principle should be considered at the national level. UNCTAD identifies diversification and value addition as important routes away from export dependence. Pakistan's exports are largely manufactured goods, yet roughly 55 percent of merchandise exports come from one sector. Any manufacturer would recognize that level of concentration as a risk if it appeared on the company’s own balance sheet. We should be equally conscious of it nationally.
Moving further into processed and branded goods would reduce that exposure and create greater margins for investment in supply, capability, and employment. It would also allow Pakistan to retain more of the value generated from its resources and labour.
Businesses cannot achieve this alone. Manufacturers need input costs that are competitive and reasonably predictable. Repeated changes in tariff lines, energy prices, and refund mechanisms make long-term investment difficult to plan and harder to sustain. Policy stability is therefore one of the most effective foundations that government can provide for industrial growth.
Turbulence has become a continuing feature of the market rather than a temporary interruption. For business leaders, the question is not only whether an enterprise can withstand the next disruption, but whether it has retained the capability to respond to what follows.
That capability is built gradually: through suppliers developed, technology maintained, and people trusted. The responsibility of leadership is to continue making those investments even when their immediate value is difficult to measure. By the time the need becomes visible, the most important decisions will already have been made.