South Asia Investor Review

Ilyas Khan, the British Pakistan founder of Quantinuum, became a billionaire in the company’s IPO on NASDAQ last week. Khan is a pioneer in the revolutionary field of quantum computing which could speed up computing by orders of magnitude. It will have a huge impact in AI and encryption.  Dr. Irfan Siddiqui , a Pakistani-American professor of Physics at University of California at Berkeley, is another top expert in quantum computing.  Ilyas Khan, British Pakistani Founder of Quantinuum. Source: 2023 BLOOMBERG FINANCE LP Quantinuum raised $1.68 billion in an initial public offering last week, making its founder Illyas Khan a billionaire, according to  Forbes . The listing, which is the largest to date for a quantum startup, valued Quantinuum at over $15.6 billion after it sold 28 million shares at $60 each on June 3. Its shares opened at $58 per share on June 9. Khan, who owns around 15% of the company, is now worth $2.2 billion. Quantinuum uses a new type of quantum ...

There are ten Pakistani immigrants included among founders or co-founders of unicorns in America, according to  a recent study by the National Foundation for American Policy ( NFAP ). A unicorn is a startup with a valuation of at least one billion U.S. dollars. Immigrant entrepreneurs of US unicorns are diverse, hailing from 76 different countries. India, with 96 companies, is the leading country of origin for the immigrant founders of U.S. billion-dollar companies. Immigrants from Israel founded the second-most billion-dollar companies with 60, followed by the United Kingdom (47), China (41), Canada (30), Russia (23), France (21), Germany (18), Ukraine (16), Australia (14), Pakistan (10) and Romania (10). Some companies were founded by entrepreneurs from the same country or immigrants from multiple countries. Four of Ten Pakistani-American Founders Listed Among Unicorns Why are Indian entrepreneurs leading the pack of unicorn founders/co-founders in America?  The key reason i...

"Indians live like cockroaches and die like cockroaches", argued Jayant Bhandari in an  X post  in April this year. "They vote for bottom of the barrel cockroaches as rulers, who rightly treat them as cockroaches", he added, faulting the people of India for this state of affairs. More recently, Indian Supreme Court Chief Justice Surya Kant said during a hearing that certain unemployed youth were "like cockroaches" who enter professions with fake degrees or become social media and RTI activists attacking the system.  Abhijeet Dipke, a 30-year-old Indian graduate of the public relations program at Boston University, picked up on it. He posted on X on May 16: “What if all cockroaches came together?” Dipke created a political party, named it Cockroach Janata Party (CJP), a parody of the ruling Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), and established a  website  that quickly gained tens of millions of followers, according to the  New York Times .  Cockroach Janata Part...

President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif have met today in Beijing to reaffirm the "unbreakable" bond between their two "iron brother" countries on the 75th anniversary of the establishment of the China-Pakistan diplomatic ties. "No matter how the international landscape may evolve, China will always place priority on the development of China-Pakistan relations in its diplomacy with neighboring countries," he said. Over 7 decades of friendship witnessed Pakistan help bring about the US-China rapprochement that has enabled the Asian giant to grow from international isolation to what President Donald Trump recently declared part of "G2", the exclusive group of two real superpowers in the world today. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif's three-day visit to China has seen the signing of multiple agreements to further strengthened strategic and economic relations between two Asian neighbors. These deals are aimed at developing Pakistan...

A Pakistan-American franchisee has joined a Qatari-backed investor group's bid to buy out the US-based Papa John's Pizza restaurants chain. Nadeem Bajwa started his part-time job in 1991 as a pizza delivery driver for Papa John's while attending college in Indiana. He has since risen to become the largest franchisee with nearly 300 restaurants across the United States. Bajwa's backing could help Irth, which is also backed by Brookfield Asset Management, in its $47 a share pursuit of the pizza chain. Papa John's has been reviewing Irth's offer, though sources told Reuters there is no guarantee a deal gets done. Papa John's Largest Franchisee Nadeem Bajwa Bajwa’s journey wasn’t easy. In his early twenties, he was the first in his family to move to the United States, where he encountered many challenges upon arrival. “Coming to the U.S., actually, that was my first flight [ever.] I’d never flown before,” Bajwa told CNBC News . “Just getting into the plane, it w...

In a television speech to the nation, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi urged his people to make sacrifices by spending less on fuel, fertilizer, and travel. He also asked them not to buy gold for a year. “To save foreign exchange, we must accept the challenge of patriotism,” he said. It appears that India's problems do not just stem from the effects of the US-Iran war; India's problems started well before that. Flight of foreign capital has put the Indian currency under tremendous pressure, with the Indian rupee falling nearly 10% in recent months. Many analysts believe that the Indian IT services exports could fall significantly as the artificial intelligence (AI) models begin to replace the IT workers. It could create a balance of payments crisis that could force India to seek the IMF bailout in the not too distant future.  Already, the Indian economy has slipped to the sixth-largest economy by nominal GDP , dropping from previous projections that had it at fourth. Indian ...