Chairman and CEO
As the cofounder and chairman of AG, Mr. Ahmed is widely recognized for his entrepreneurship and contributions to Pakistan’s energy sector and economy.
Mr. Ahmed and his companies have been featured in Newsweek International, Forbes, Bloomberg, Reuters, DAWN, CNBC, and CNBC Pakistan. As a pioneering businessman in the energy sector, he has been invited as a public speaker at key energy summits and conferences, including, amongst others, the CWC LNG summits, held in Lisbon in December 2018 and December 2019. In 2020 and 2023, he participated in the Gastech summits held in Milan and Singapore, respectively.
His contribution to the LPG sector has been widely recognized through his dynamic and risk-assessed approach in creating Pakistan’s most modern LPG Extraction Facility in Sindh, which resulted in more liberalization and competition in the LPG supply chain in the country. No other plant, to date, since 2005, has been able to reach the optimal efficiency of LPG recovery that Mr. Ahmed’s plant is capable of.
His other notable achievement is having been the first among many to have introduced the concept of LNG in Pakistan in 2006. It took nearly 11 years, though to be able to navigate the bottlenecks that often hamper business confidence in the country where Mr. Ahmed finally set up the country’s first greenfield energy project, bringing in a total investment of $US500 million to the energy sector in Pakistan. In July 2024, owing to his experience in the energy sector, Mr. Iqbal Z. Ahmed was appointed a member of the Prime Minister’s Committee on Issues Faced by the E&P Sector.
Mr. Ahmed currently is a member of the Board of Trustees of his alma mater, Government College University Lahore. Besides that, he’s also the founding figure of his alma mater’s endowment trust fund, which was created in 2004, and has since raised over PKR500 million. Previously, Mr. Ahmed served as the chairman of SIMS (Services Institute of Medical Sciences) in Lahore.
Mr. Ahmed is also the chairman of Pakistan Standard, (formerly Newsweek Pakistan), now an entirely online news portal, as well as the not-for-profit, internationally celebrated Lahore Literary Festival (LLF), for which he has been a major pillar of support since its inception in 2013.
Mr. Ahmed has served as the president of King Edward Medical University’s mobilization fund, on the board of the Punjab Red Crescent Society and on the National College of Arts University’s endowment committee. He is a former president of the India-Pakistan World Punjabi Organization, whose patrons include former Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Mr. Ahmed also served on the national committee for self-reliance under then-prime minister Nawaz Sharif. From 2000 to 2014, Mr. Ahmed was the elected chairman of the LPG Association of Pakistan (LPGAP).
The Lahore Chamber of Commerce and Industry honored Mr. Ahmed with its President of Pakistan trophy in 2012.
Mr. Ahmed has a bachelor’s degree in economics from Government College, and a master’s degree in economics from Punjab University.