BYD's $150m Pakistan Plant Misses Deadline Again, Mega Motor Stays Silent

KARACHI: Hub Power has pushed back the launch of its BYD assembly plant in Gharo for the second time. Nobody at the company has explained why.

Mega Motor Company, the Hub Power-BYD joint venture, told analysts in February 2025 the plant would roll out vehicles by the first half of FY26. That deadline came and went. Topline Securities this week relayed a fresh timeline from Hubco management: production starts sometime in the second half of 2026. Two months of that window are already gone.

According to Dawn, the newspaper sent a detailed list of questions to Mega Motor through its public relations firm. Why did the plant miss its target? What shape does the facility sit in right now? Is there a localization plan? How many BYD units has the company imported so far? What's the target for year one? The company answered none of it.

BYD Gharo Plant Targets 25,000 Vehicles

The silence stands out because the numbers behind this project are hard to ignore. Hub Power holds a 50 percent stake in Mega Motor. The venture with BYD, struck in June 2024, carries a $150 million price tag, $90 million of it riding on project financing. Once the Gharo line starts turning, it's built to produce 25,000 vehicles a year, with room to scale to 50,000. Mega Motor has also lined up four flagship showrooms and three service centers across Pakistan's three biggest cities to sell what the plant builds.

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Hubco isn't scaling back its ambitions despite the delay. Management wants 30 percent of Pakistan's combined EV and plug-in hybrid market by 2030 a target that assumes the assembly line gets moving well before then. Every quarter Gharo stays dark, that math gets harder to defend.

The charging side of the business tells a different story. Hub Power's subsidiary, Hubco Green, runs 24 DC fast-charging stations along the Karachi-Peshawar motorway, spaced roughly every 200 kilometers. Drivers typically plug in for 25 to 45 minutes per charge. Hubco plans to tighten that spacing to 100 kilometers, effectively doubling station density along the country's busiest highway corridor.

That raises an obvious question. What good is a dense charging network if the cars meant to use it aren't rolling off a local line? For now, Pakistan's EV buyers can charge up. They're still waiting on the vehicles Hub Power promised to build for them.

Neither Hub Power nor Mega Motor has set a new hard date beyond "second half of 2026." Investors and Pakistani drivers eyeing an electric upgrade are left watching a project that keeps moving its own goalposts.