The Dawood Group (
Urdu: داؤد گروپ) is a
group of companies headquartered in
Karachi. It is active in diverse businesses and industries of the Dawood family-business and is owned by Dawood family.
Ahmed Dawood was one of the country’s senior industrialists[3] who was by 1933 with his firm the biggest supplier of imported
yarn to the textile mills in India.[4] He left India after the
partition and migrated with his three brothers Suleman Dawood,
Siddique Dawood, and Sattar Dawood. The Dawood Corporation was the first entity set up in
Karachi and
Manchester, UK, to start business activities in 1948. It started initially from a small office and a shop in Karachi but their business grew over the coming decades.
While in 1970 all the undertakings together made it count as one of the largest business groups in the country, the following year marked an abrupt change: Following the creation of
Bangladesh in 1971, almost 60% of the businesses led by Ahmed Dawood and all investments in
East Pakistan were lost due to the nationalisation there.[5] The remaining enterprises in Pakistan suffered further setbacks after the
nationalisation in the early-mid-1970s.
Memon Cooperative Bank, it was founded in 1958 by Dawood family as an intra-caste credit bank for
Memon community.[11] The bank was nationalised in 1974[8]