On May 03, 2024, PakWheelsBlog has made an article covering tweets by famous economist Ali Khizer.

https://www.pakwheels.com/blog/ex-gst-rate-reason-of-sudden-huge-drops-in-car-prices/

in which they discuss the reason of these price cuts.

Moreover there is a comprehensive article https://www.pakwheels.com/blog/review-of-cars-with-best-price-drops-in-2024/ summarizing all the recent price cuts, but Changan Oshan is remaining although they published that news 2 articles before it.

The claim that “booking system is not working” when the whole of industry doesn’t sell more than 200,000 vehicles per year is a joke. They are so lame, the whole of the cohort together can’t manage their IT infra.

IT infrastructure in Pakistan is usually weak. If you randomly visit a bank branch, frequently the link is down or the system is slow. Careem’s database was also stolen a few years ago. BankIslami’s ATM cards database was also stolen. Recently PakSuzuki was also hacked [https://carspiritpk.com/pak-suzuki-hit-by-cyber-attack/].
Automotive companies and their suppliers in general have been seeing hacks,data breaches, ransomware attempts and production shutdowns due to hacks, not limited to Pakistan but all over Asia.

Yet mega conglomerate tech companies like Facebook, Google and Microsoft provide their service free of cost with 100% reliability and speed. [The free of cost part is debatable because some people will say they datamine you, your data is sold 1000s of times per second and that is how these companies earn, but that is beside the fact. These companies also offer a multitude of paid services and paying doesn’t mean the data won’t be sold.]

If you see the annual financial report of many of our local companies, there is a separate head for IT equipment and services. Usually the figure there is very, very low. Many times just the bill of 10 Mbps ADSL or fiber-optic connection is the only thing that is under that head. You see the desktop or laptops the staff is using and it is in dilapidated condition. Some keys are broken on the keyboard, for some the screen has dark spots. If you talk about the IT department, many times there is 1 single person overloaded with Windows installations and with replacement of always failing ancient hardware. There is a lot of security, lots of retired army personnel ranging from sepoy (R) to Brig (R) but there is no concept of IT security. When IT security is discussed, usually the USB of PCs is disabled and internet disallowed on operator terminals, making the work difficult or impossible, yet the IoT devices CCTVs routers and company intranet is open to all access.

I have had the pleasure (or pain?) in sitting in budgeting meetings and whenever I ask what is the IT budget for the next quarter? Or what was the IT spending for the last annum? What is the IT spending budget of other competitor companies? What should the IT spending target be? What should the IT savings & cost cutting target be? What is the industry average of IT spending? What is the expected rate of return on IT spending?

People literally are flabbergasted like it never crossed their mind. They don’t have any answers. The filmtastic dialogs like “IT is the future” are thrown around randomly yet the companies don’t want to spend on IT = they don’t want to spend on their future.

Overall the IT scenario is comical and while I generally refrain from victim-blaming, in this case they do deserve what they get.

Absolutely right Sir! 👍

I hope this is the beginning of a trend and all other local assemblers follow suit.

a similar move by Peugeot is expected too 🙂

The other point is that, now, this car is priced right! It is now in a position to give serious competition to the Suzuki swift and even the Changan Alsvin, especially in the case of those buyers for whom a “duggi wali gadi” is not a priority. A good move long over due.