Singapore-based cash buyer Wirana has called on the Pakistani government to grant ship recycling scrap the same tax treatment applied to other imported ferrous and non-ferrous scrap grades, arguing that the current differential puts the country's recycling yards at a competitive disadvantage.

The appeal, reported by Ship Management International, puts the spotlight back on Pakistan's fiscal regime for the shipbreaking sector, which has struggled to recover the market position it once held at the Gadani complex on the Balochistan coast. Wirana — one of the dominant cash buyers in the demolition market, alongside firms such as GMS and Best Oasis — positions itself as a key intermediary between owners selling end-of-life tonnage and recycling yards in South Asia.

The core of the company's argument is straightforward. Ship recycling generates large volumes of recyclable steel plate, machinery and non-ferrous material, and that material stream competes directly with conventionally imported scrap feeding Pakistan's induction-furnace and re-rolling sectors. If demolition-derived steel plate carries a heavier tax or duty burden than ordinary scrap imports, buyers shift their orders to alternative supply — and yards in Gadani see their end-market margin squeezed twice: once on ship acquisition prices, and again at the point of sale for recovered material.

Equal treatment, in Wirana's framing, is not a subsidy request but a parity request. The company wants ship recycling scrap classified and taxed on the same basis as other scrap entering the country, removing a distortion that discourages domestic plate consumption and, by extension, weakens demand for end-of-life vessels landed at Pakistani beaches.

The timing matters for the regional demolition market. South Asian yards in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan have seen softer vessel supply as owners held onto older tonnage during the freight earnings boom of recent years, and cash buyer margins have tightened accordingly. Within that competition for a limited number of demolition candidates, fiscal treatment of the recovered steel is one of the few levers a national government controls directly. Bangladesh has moved to consolidate its sector under green-yard regulation with credit support; India's Alang cluster has invested in Hong Kong Convention-compliant facilities to keep EU-approved tonnage eligible. Pakistan's competitive answer, Wirana suggests, should start with the tax code rather than with infrastructure pledges.

The request also carries a circularity dimension that regulators in Islamabad will have to weigh. Pakistan's domestic steel industry depends heavily on scrap as its primary metallic feedstock, and demolition plate from ships is among the highest-quality recycled steel streams available to it — thick, clean and directly rollable in many cases. A tax structure that penalizes that stream effectively favors lower-grade or imported alternatives over a material already being recovered within the country's own industrial process at Gadani.

For Wirana, the policy ask aligns with its commercial exposure. Cash buyers finance and position tonnage against specific beaching markets, and a buyer with vessels allocated to Pakistani yards benefits directly from any measure that restores Gadani's purchasing power relative to Alang or Chattogram. Industry observers will read the intervention in that light, but the underlying parity question stands independently of who raised it.

Pakistan's government has not yet responded publicly to the proposal, and no legislative or budgetary measure has been tabled. The country's Federal Board of Revenue periodically revises duty and sales-tax schedules for imported scrap grades, and any change for ship-recycling material would move through that process.

What happens next sits with Pakistan's budget and revenue authorities. Watch for any amendment to the customs or sales-tax treatment of demolition steel in the next fiscal package — that filing, or its absence, will determine whether Wirana's parity call becomes policy or remains a talking point in the beaching market.