‘With only 3pc vaccination, we are sitting on a time bomb’

KARACHI: “Not just Pakistan but the entire world is slow at learning,” said Getz Pharma CEO Khalid Mahmood on Wednesday, and hoped that Pakistan had learnt from the Covid-19 pandemic.

Addressing the CEO Forum 2021, titled ‘After Covid: What have we learnt?’, at the Institute of Business Administration (IBA), he stressed that the world needs to spend most of their gross domestic product (GDP) on health.

Mahmood said that at 1.5 per cent, India has the lowest GDP spending on health. He said the country has so much potential in science, and they have missiles, but their hospitals and their health care is despicable.

He said Covid does not discriminate between rich and poor, Hindu and Muslim, black and white. As for Pakistan, it has a different situation, he added. “Our deaths are low.” But, he pointed out, our infant mortality is twice than Bangladesh’s, and 19 per cent of the population has diabetes; still, we spend very little on health.

About what we have learnt from Covid, Mahmood said Pakistan has some challenges and some opportunities. He said the country of over 200 million people with brilliant minds does not produce its own vaccine.

“We are sitting on a time bomb. Only three per cent of our population is vaccinated. Herd immunity does not develop unless 70 per cent of the population is immune to the virus.” Avari Towers Executive Director Dinshaw B Avari said he did not fire any of his staff from Avari Hotels during the pandemic. “We must look after those who are less fortunate. We don’t need to advertise about it. We had to close Avari Xpress Properties.”

He said that with hardly 10 rooms occupied, they could not cover the cost of one room. He added that they controlled variable costs, like they did not need to pay the transport allowance of their staff because most of them worked from home.

Geo News Managing Director Azhar Abbas said that dealing with Covid was a challenge for the media industry as well. “We had challenges for print and electronic media. Reporters and cameramen had to go out to cover various incidents in the city.”

He said that the field staff were not only putting their lives at risk but also of the people they were covering and talking to. The other major challenge was to create a balance between populism and what was happening on ground, as the government had said Covid was nothing more than the flu that would go away, he added.

Abbas said that another challenge was to keep people informed without creating panic. “We were informing through news channels about what was happening in India but needed to make sure that there wasn’t much of a panic in Pakistan.”

As for the human resource issue in the media industry, he said the TV staff was digital savvy, while the print staff were much more digital-friendly, but working from home was quite a challenge for them. We created Pakistan’s first virtual newsroom during the pandemic, he added. “We turned a challenge into an opportunity.”

But in terms of business, print media is still suffering, he lamented. As for TV channels, he pointed out that there was a revenue growth of 30 per cent this year, while digital revenue showed a 33 per cent growth.

FnkAsia Creative Director Huma Adnan said that as a fashion designer, she realised that all the integrated units were to be changed during the pandemic. “Shops, supply chains, designers — everything was to be changed.”

She said that there was a need to come up with plans and strategies immediately. “It was a struggle, but we believe in change. We had to adapt to change, which was forced upon us.” She added that their supply chain suffered due to the shutdown of factories and supply chain units. “We used to work with 12 people only. There weren’t any stores to sell from.”

Huma said that the online set-up was there but they needed to learn by themselves and teach their staff as well. “We expanded our digital know-how big time. We had to pick up pace with what the rest of the world was doing. Google was a lot of help. We had one of the highest sales last year, and we gave bonuses to our workers.”

Reckitt Pakistan CEO Kashan Hasan, who has served in various leadership roles across the globe in numerous organisations, said the pandemic was a big challenge for them from day one. “We knew we were the front line,” he said, adding that their five months of imported sanitisers were sold in three days.

They doubled their production three times but there was no sanitiser on the shelves and there was a shortage of raw material, so they worked towards localisation. “Our learning was to get closer to home. Our team did a fantastic job in finding local sources.”