Sialkot, Pakistan’s export capital, represents an economy and a class of entrepreneurs quite different from that nurtured by the state apparatus over the years. Though Sialkot’s roads and other infrastructure are primitive and choked, yet the culture of enterprise sported by this city and its contribution to the national economy is unmatched by any other city in the country.

Located 130 kilometres northwest of the provincial capital Lahore, and with a population of about 600,000, Sialkot is in many ways a unique city in Pakistan. A strong export and entrepreneurial culture combined with widespread availability of subcontracting arrangements has resulted in low barriers to entry and a proliferation of small and medium scale enterprises. These enterprises are financed mostly through family savings. They compete by remaining lean, with low and shared overheads. They thrive through a network of subcontracting relations, which allows each company to specialise in only part of the overall value chain. These are enterprises deeply embedded in the socio-economic context in which they exist. The trickle down effect in terms of information, skills, and wealth are many; in sharp contrast to the relatively insular circuits of power and wealth promoted by the vertically integrated organisations, which have developed elsewhere in the country.

The craftsmen entrepreneurs of Sialkot with their middle class backgrounds, represent an industrial bourgeoisie which has emerged to fill the vacuum created by the departure of the primarily non-Muslim trading and industrial class to India. These craftsmen entrepreneurs are quite distinct from another small but powerful industrial elite class, which also emerged at this time.

The latter class consisted mostly of traders -turned-industrialists who received strong support from government policies and invested essentially in capital-intensive and highly protected large scale manufacturing industries. A considerable concentration of wealth soon accumulated with sixty industrial groups, controlling two-thirds of all industrial assets and eighty percent of bank assets by 1954. The seventies saw the nationalisation of the financial sector and a substantial part of the large-scale industry.

Sialkot epitomises the industrial bourgeoisie of Pakistan, a class that has created "pockets of efficiency" in the economy.