Karachi Electric Supply Corporation

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Karachi Electric Supply Corporation (KESC) is a privately owned public utility company. It was incorporated. The Corporation was originally in private hands, but the Government of Pakistan took control of the Corporation by acquiring majority share holdings in 1952.

It is principally engaged in generation, transmission and distribution of electric energy to industrial, commercial, agricultural and residential consumers in Karachi. KESC is the sole supplier of electricity to Karachi and its suburbs up to Dhabeji and Gharo in Sindh and over Hub, Uthal, Vindhar and Bela in Baluchistan.

Recently, KESC was sold to a Saudi Arabian company in December 2005 via an open bid organised by the Privatisation Commission of Pakistan. Since then its operation management is under control of Siemens Pakistan.

On 6th March 2008 the entire city of Karachi suffered a huge power blackout that left most of Karachi's 12 million residents without electricity. The outage came after Pakistan's main power utility accused the electricity company supplying the southern port of refusing to settle debts of more than half a billion dollars. KESC owed 34.8 billion rupees (548 million dollars) to the Water and Power Development Authority.^[1] ^[2] ^[3] ^[4] ^[5]

Although Karachi has had a long history of power outages, it only affected certain districts for a few hours at a time. This was the first time that the entire city had suffered a lengthy simultaneous blackout.