Wirana, the Singapore-headquartered ship buyer and cash purchaser active in South Asian demolition markets, has called on Pakistan to extend equal tax treatment to ferrous scrap generated by the country's ship recycling sector, according to a report by the American Journal of Transportation.

The request lands squarely on a fiscal question that has long shaped competitiveness in the demolition trade: whether material recovered from end-of-life vessels at Pakistani yards is taxed on the same basis as other domestically recovered scrap. Pakistan's ship recycling industry, centred on the Gadani beaching complex in Balochistan, competes directly with yards in Alang, India and Chattogram, Bangladesh for tonnage sold by cash buyers such as Wirana. Tax treatment of the recovered steel feedstock is one of several parameters — alongside plate prices, currency movement and vessel availability — that determine where owners send ships for recycling.

Wirana's appeal positions the company as an advocate for the Pakistani demolition stream at a moment when South Asian yards' share of global scrapping remains sensitive to small changes in relative netbacks. Where recycled steel plate from Gadani faces levies or withholding that other scrap streams avoid, the effective price paid to yards falls, and that differential flows back into the bids cash buyers can offer for tonnage.

The company's intervention is a lobbying position rather than a filing: it urges a change in how Pakistan's tax code classifies ship-derived scrap, seeking parity with the treatment applied to comparable recycled material. No specific tariff rate, exemption value or revenue figure accompanied the statement as reported.

For Pakistan's steelmaking sector, the material outcome matters in volume terms. Gadani-derived plate and sections feed induction furnace and re-rolling capacity domestically, and any fiscal wedge between ship scrap and alternative feedstock alters procurement decisions by melters. Equal treatment, as Wirana frames it, would remove a distortion rather than create a subsidy.

What happens next sits with Pakistan's Federal Board of Revenue and finance ministry, which set the withholding and sales tax rules governing recycled commodities. Any move to equalise treatment of ship recycling scrap would come through the fiscal framework — budget measures or administrative ruling — and would be watched by competing yards in India and Bangladesh as an input to their own pricing positions.