KARACHI: Eidul Azha – one of the most celebrated religious festivals for Muslims – brings a good opportunity for many to start business and make handsome earnings. Apart from part-timers and seasonal businessmen who try to capitalise on the opportunity, there are some who toil and wait a whole year to earn returns on their investments. By Farhan Zaheer

One of those is Touheed Ali Toor of Chaudhary Farms, a Lahore-based cattle farmer, who anxiously waits for Eidul Azha every year.

For him, Eid is a two-week season that comes once a year for which he has to work hard for almost a year. Toor believes that this business is capital-intensive as well as risky because sometimes the investor ends up reaping very little or no profit.

He started his business two years ago. This year he raised 65 bulls, some for four months and some for 10 months, and has already sold 50 of them.

He cautions that the business is not for everyone for a couple of reasons. It needs expertise and significant investment, say at least Rs2 million, to get respectable returns.

“I work with my brother and cousins who were already in the cattle farm business,” says Toor. “I took the risk of investing may be because of some prior knowledge of the business.”

However, it does not mean newcomers cannot venture into the arena, he says, adding they just need to wait for a few months to gain some experience.

He suggests that prospective investors can also tap the meat export market, which offers better returns. A number of Pakistani companies are now exporting meat and need reliable cattle farmers, who can supply healthy animals that meet international standards.

Besides raising animals for Eid, Toor is considering exporting meat in coming years. Markets like Dubai prove lucrative for meat exporters, he says.

Chaudhary Farms, in partnership with professional butchers, is booking orders for Eid through internet. Many professional or seasonal butchers and cattle farmers are using classified websites for advertisements, most of which are free, and Chaudhary Farms is one of them.

A small entrepreneur from Lahore, Muhammad Ali, an established computer engineer in mid-30s, published advertisements with his mobile number and address of his new website on different classified websites. He is booking orders for goats, share in cows and bulls and slaughter of animals for the first time this Eid.

He has registered a domain – onlinebakra.com – and got hundreds of calls for booking orders. With a very simple website in Urdu, he says he has got exceptional response until now. He hopes to make profits from next year after establishing his name in the city.

“This is my part-time business and I will continue with my job,” says Ali. “I want to grow the business and in partnership with my friends, I want to start cattle farming from this year.”

“I am a computer professional, so obviously using internet for advertising is close to my heart,” says Ali, adding more and more people are using internet to purchase sacrificial animals and book butchers.

Qurbanionline is Pakistan’s oldest and busiest website for purchase of sacrificial animals and slaughtering orders.

Qurbanionline Co-founder Hasnain Raza tells The Express Tribune that this year they have already got over 3,000 orders, of which around 1,300 are from overseas.

Launched around six years ago, the website has expanded considerately since then. It got 350 orders in 2009 and around 1,000 orders in 2010.

“Buying and selling of animals on the internet is growing, but there are only a few who have survived in this market,” says Raza. “The market will grow continuously, but only those, who work with sincerity, will stay because it is all about trust.”

By @Maryam Dodhy for Techjuice
Usage of technology as an enabler is the way to go forward. If we look around ourselves, we will find a great number of examples where usage of technology has made our lives so much more easier.

Long gone are the days when people had to spend days upon days searching the Bakra Mandi for the perfect animal. Sacrificial animals are being sold online making this task hassle free. However, the concept isn’t entirely new. This practice has been around for a few years now. People have been putting sacrificial animal for sale ads on social media and OLX but on a limited scale. QurbaniOnline is a site specifically geared for this task.

The online sale of animals is expected to rise this year. People at qurbanionline.com say that they sold 67,000 animals in 2013 and 75,000 animals in 2014 and that number is expected to rise up to 100,000 this year. These online sites make purchase easy for those of us scared to hunt markets. Here you are expected to find a goat for about Rs. 23,000 and a cow for a little over 72,000.

Now this article is not focused on the online forums that will help you find the right bakra but rather on why the need has arise for such forums to exist and how Pakistan is gradually moving towards a digital future. If you compare your life now to what it was a decade ago, you’ll probably think our lives have become fast-paced and very technology-oriented. Everything has gone electronic and its catalyst is a sudden boom of technology. Back up a few years, how many laptops (and other smart gadgets) did you have in your house then? How many do you have now? There lies your answer. Everything is a click away. Want to buy some clothes? Visit an online store. Book your appointmentsonline. Plan your wedding online. Order food, maintenance services – and now sacrificial animals for Eid-ul-Azha.

Long story short, we have an online alternative of everything now. Don’t feel like getting out of the house? Order online. And there’s nothing bad about this trend either. If there’s anything it’s doing, it’s making lives easier. So, don’t ask why do we need an online alternative of everything, the question you should be asking is why didn’t we think of this before? The answer is because we weren’t as technology-friendly as we are now. These days, a Pakistani household that has at least one member pursuing higher education will have an abundance of smart gadgets. Naturally, these people will use such websites to make their life easier. This trend will only grow and is a reminder of the fact of how fast Pakistan is moving towards a digital future.

As seen on TV and Newspaper

Buy Your Qurbani Online. It’s That Easy!

Stacks of hay, beaded jewelry stalls and smell of bakras/gayes is in the air. With each passing day, cheering and excitement in the streets is evident. Noticeably, bakra sacrifice trend is over taken by cow or bull sacrifice but then comes a responsibility of performing qurbani, a demonstration of total submission to Allah’s will and command. Indeed a big task of Eid days for men. Welcome to the new genre of shopping, now you don’t have to spend countless exhausting hours or to bargain for the chosen animal. Also, no need for loading animal to finally bring home. All such hassles have got one solution i.e. purchasing online.

Listed below are top websites /online forums where you will get whole details along with real animal pictures.

#1 QurbaniOnline.com
Top website these days, for all those with loads of work or simply refusing to visit mandis. One of the organized site where you can select type of animal, weight and the breed. After that, you will be informed with pricing information. You have two options, either to ask/ refer for bringing the animal home. Or to ask them for sacrifice and send back the meat.

MONEY is flowing fast into the sacrificial animals business, while the growing use of online marketing continues to reshape the market dynamics.

But investors who had spent billions of rupees in advanced booking of animals are not sure if their net return would rise as dramatically as it did in previous years.

The recent ban on the slaughtering of cows and she-goats in Punjab (to ensure faster livestock growth) is being ignored by animal traders on the grounds that it is meant for regular slaughtering, and not during Eid-ul-Azha.

And the Rangers’ ongoing operation in Karachi against criminals and bad elements in political parties has affected the sacrificial animal market in two ways. On one hand, the animal traders are doing business with lesser fear of bhatta (extortion money). But on the other, the local administration’s new-found zeal for implementing the rule of law is making it difficult for the traders to set up temporary markets for sacrificial animals wherever they wish.

Source: Dawn – Qurbani Online[/vc_column_text][vc_message style=”square” message_box_color=”grey” icon_type=”pixelicons” css_animation=”bottom-to-top” icon_pixelicons=”vc_pixel_icon vc_pixel_icon-tick”]

A trader at a leading online portal hopes to sell 100,000 sacrificial animals this year, up from 75,000 last year and 67,000 a year before that

[/vc_message][vc_column_text]Traders are frequenting between Karachi and the rural areas of Sindh or Punjab with greater ease and are bringing in truckloads of sacrificial animals to the city’s main market on Super Highway.

The cut in petroleum prices effective from September 1 has also come as a blessing for them, as they believe that it will help them contain the cost of transporting animals from rural areas to city and town markets.

Meanwhile, the online sale of animals is also expected to rise. People at Qurbanionline.com say they hope to sell 100,000 animals this year, up from 75,000 last year and 67,000 a year before that. People can buy a goat via this online facility for $225 or about Rs23,000 and a cow for $710 (a little over Rs72,000).

The Al-Shaheer Corporation, which owns the Meat One brand, has also offered the facility of qurbani to its customers for Rs22,000 per goat and Rs99,000 per cow. The deal includes the delivery of meat.

Online services for buying sacrificial animals and for participating in collective sacrifices are offered by several other web portals as well. And young investors are also using OLX.com and similar websites to sell animals on a limited scale.

At Karachi’s main market on Super Highway and in some other markets across the city, the prices of goats and sheep of average height and weight ranged between Rs20,000-30,000 and between Rs15,000-Rs25,000 respectively (till last Tuesday). Meanwhile, cows and calves of average height and weight were priced at Rs60,000-Rs100,000.

The welfare arms of political parties and charities have set their rates for goats at Rs15,000-Rs20,000 and for cows and calves at Rs49,000-Rs72,000 depending upon the size and weight of the animals and the places where the collective sacrifice would take place.

“Animal prices for end-buyers may rise further as Eid-ul-Azha gets closer. But investors would earn no big profits this year,” says a Karachi-based livestock broker who booked 300 cows and bulls in Bahawalpur and 300 goats in Tando Adam in the last week of June.

“I made bookings at an average rate of 60,000 per cow or calf and Rs12,000 per goat and the prices also covered the upkeep and grazing charges for three months,” he told this writer. He said half of the total price of all animals was paid at the time of booking and the remaining 50pc is being paid per truckload of animals on their arrival in Karachi.

This investor is expecting a maximum 30pc return on his investment (Rs22.5m paid as 50pc of the total price of animals in June), which works out at 10pc per month. Since the remaining 50pc price would be paid out of the money he is receiving from local traders, the 10pc net monthly return would not be diluted. “But then it’s not too big, as I have earned higher returns in previous years.”

He represents a class of investment-hoppers, charities, once-a-year-formed groups of crowd financers, NGOs, online traders, and the welfare arms of political parties and religious seminaries. They book sacrificial animals several months before Eid-ul-Azha and earn better returns on their investment owing to lower animal prices due to their bulk forward buying.

No credible estimate is available about such investment, but it certainly runs into tens of billions of rupees.

People had spent Rs350-400bn on purchasing sacrificial animals last year, according to a conservative estimate based on the post-Eid collection of hides and skins (7.4m reported by tanneries but close to 10m by other guesstimates). This year, such spending is expected to remain either unchanged or rise modestly, say sources associated with the cattle trade.

Meanwhile, individual animal-selling arguably fetches higher returns because it is at this stage that the animals are categorised not only by their weight and size but also by their breed or looks, with their prices set accordingly.

Published in Dawn, Economic & Business, September 7th, 2015[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/6″][vc_single_image image=”993″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center” onclick=”custom_link” css_animation=”right-to-left” title=”Aqiqa” link=”/aqiqa-online”][vc_single_image image=”330″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center” css_animation=”right-to-left” title=”Qurbani Online”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text css_animation=”bottom-to-top”]

As seen on TV and Newspaper

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