Aurangzeb Says Pakistan Could Raise Over $1 Billion From Privatisation This Year

Pakistan expects to raise more than $1 billion this fiscal year from privatising five or six state-owned entities, Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb said in an interview with Reuters on the sidelines of the IMF and World Bank's 2026 Annual Meetings in Bangkok on October 12.

"I expect about five or six of these to go through during this fiscal year," Aurangzeb said, adding that roughly a dozen entities are in the broader privatisation pipeline, including state-owned power distribution companies and the outsourcing of airport operations. "We are quite clear that we want the private sector to lead the country," he said.

A pipeline that follows last year's PIA sale

The push builds on the privatisation of Pakistan International Airlines, completed last year. Power distribution companies have long been identified as the next major candidates: they sit at the centre of Pakistan's circular debt problem, and shifting their management away from the state has been a recurring theme in the country's IMF-linked reform agenda. Aurangzeb did not give a timeframe for when the power distribution or airport deals would close, only that five or six transactions in total are expected to be completed within the fiscal year.

Growth forecast moves ahead of the ADB's number

Aurangzeb said he still expects Pakistan's economy to grow more than 4 percent this fiscal year. "So I'm still quite clear that we should clock north of 4pc," he said, despite what he described as elevated oil prices. That would put growth ahead of the Asian Development Bank's 3.7 percent FY2027 forecast, issued in September, which had already flagged energy costs tied to the Middle East conflict as the main constraint on faster acceleration. Aurangzeb's figure is the government's own projection rather than an independent multilateral estimate, and it has not yet been tested against a full quarter of data.

The IMF deal in the background

Aurangzeb's comments come a week after Pakistan and the IMF reached a staff-level agreement on the fourth review of its $7 billion Extended Fund Facility and the third review of its Resilience and Sustainability Facility, a deal that would unlock about $1 billion under the EFF and about $210 million under the RSF once the Fund's Executive Board signs off. Pakistan is separately negotiating a proposed $10 billion exchange stabilisation facility with the United States, along with discussions involving the Export-Import Bank of the United States and the US International Development Finance Corporation. "If it comes through, this will be a great help for us," Aurangzeb said of the US facility, without giving a timeframe for when it might be finalised.

Why the oil-price caveat matters

Aurangzeb's own framing — growth above 4 percent "despite" elevated oil prices — points to the same pressure the ADB flagged as a risk to its own forecast: the US-Israeli-led war with Iran, now in its eighth month, has kept global energy markets volatile and left Pakistan's import bill exposed to swings in crude prices. Pakistan depends heavily on Gulf energy imports, and on remittances and financing from the same region, which is part of why a conflict thousands of kilometres from its own borders keeps showing up in the finance minister's growth arithmetic.

What to watch

The test of Aurangzeb's $1 billion privatisation estimate will be whether any of the five or six targeted transactions actually close this fiscal year — privatisation deals in Pakistan have a long history of slipping pipelines and missed deadlines, most recently with the power distribution companies the government has been trying to offload for several budget cycles.

Build Better Pakistan's Economy Desk is tracking Pakistan's privatisation programme and growth outlook and will update this piece as transactions are confirmed.