Under the IDG Wakhan portfolio, the SPIN brand in partnership with its parent company NCC-RP Group brought in first CIO Pakistan magazine, CSO Pakistan magazine, and following this, we brought in CMO, CEO, and CFO World. Addendum to the CXO Media portfolio for enterprises, we then added prosumer brands PC World and Mac World Pakistan to the portfolio as well as taking on the franchises for CIO and PC World for both Afghanistan and Tajikistan. All these brands were launched, circa 2008 onwards up to 2013 when Computer World, which was already in Pakistan since 1995, was added to the portfolio.
Within these and combining the names of the three territories – Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan – we decided to go with the name IDG Wakhan named after the three nations joint border area Wakhan Corridor, instead of IDG Pakistan. However, due to the existing geo-economic and geopolitical situation, the Afghanistan and Tajikistan portfolios couldn’t take off as expected and eventually, we ceded those franchises back to IDG and continued with the larger Pakistan portfolio, eventually merging PC World, Macworld, and others into the Computerworld platform.
Then in 2015, we purchased the DEMO franchise for Pakistan, from IDG’s sub-company Network World’s and the brand was their premier showcasing for startup platforms. This was launched internationally in 1991 and was the first set of conferences to actually showcase tech startups, in the world and spread to several countries including China, Russia, India, Vietnam, including of course several cities across the USA, and then eventually also in Pakistan. However, DEMO was discontinued by IDG in the very year that it signed with Pakistan and eventually became a startup storytelling brand.
As of now, within the IDG Wakhan portfolio, we have run the CIO magazine and its sister brands under the CXO media umbrella for the last seventeen years almost, and Computer World, which will turn thirty in 2025, also is within our domain, and DEMO Pakistan will be relaunched as a website as well as an intelligence brand reporting on how the startup and PNE system are working in Pakistan and the closer regions.
This is the IDG Wakhan brand portfolio within the Smart Pakistan Insights Network framework and as the media landscape evolves so are the brands.
