Client Name

Prime Global Energies Limited

Faculty Advisor

Dr. Azima Khan

SBS Thought Leadership Areas

Investment Decision Making

SBS Thought Leadership Area Justification

This ELP project is classified under the Investment Decision Making thought leadership area of IBA School of Business Studies, which encompasses applied work that supports organisations in making informed, evidence-based financial decisions relating to capital allocation, cost management, and financial performance assessment.

All three deliverables directly serve this area. The Non-Operating JV Accrual Model enables Prime Global Energies' Finance team to accurately compute their net cost share across three joint venture blocks and produce the accrual figure that feeds into month-end financial statements. Accurate accruals are foundational to reliable financial reporting, and reliable financial reporting is the basis on which investment and operational decisions are made. An error in a non-operating JV where the company does not control costs directly can materially misstate the company's position and mislead decision-makers.

The Branch Cost Variance Model and CFO Dashboard support management control decisions by surfacing which cost categories are running above or below budget and identifying the specific drivers behind those variances. This enables leadership to take corrective action in real time and present structured, evidence-based cost analysis to the Board the kind of decision support that sits at the heart of the Investment Decision Making domain.

The Financial Ratio Analysis for PIOGCL extends this further by providing a structured three-year view of the company's profitability, liquidity, solvency, and per-share performance the analytical lens through which investors and Board members evaluate whether capital is being efficiently deployed.

Taken together, the three deliverables build analytical infrastructure that strengthens financial decision-making at multiple levels of the organisation, from month-end operational control to Board-level strategic review.

Aligned SDGs

GOAL 17: Partnerships to achieve the Goal

Aligned SDGs Justification

Partnerships to Achieve the Goal, which emphasises the importance of multi-stakeholder collaboration between academia, the private sector, and other institutions to build capacity, share knowledge, and achieve sustainable development outcomes.

The project is itself a structured partnership between two institutions the Institute of Business Administration (IBA), Karachi, one of Pakistan's leading business schools, and Prime Global Energies Limited, an upstream oil and gas company operating in Pakistan's energy sector. This partnership, facilitated through IBA's Experiential Learning Project program, placed four business students within Prime's Finance function for a sustained engagement, enabling direct knowledge transfer in both directions. Prime's Finance team contributed domain expertise, data access, and professional mentorship. The student team contributed analytical capacity, financial modelling skills, and independent output that the organisation continues to use after the engagement concluded.

This model of academia-industry collaboration is precisely what SDG 17 seeks to promote. It builds human capital within the student team through real-world exposure that classroom learning alone cannot replicate. It simultaneously delivers tangible value to the corporate partner in the form of three functional financial tools — the Non-Operating JV Accrual Model, the Branch Cost Variance Model with CFO Dashboard, and the Financial Ratio Analysis that address genuine operational needs within the Finance function.

The ELP program at IBA institutionalises this type of partnership at scale, creating a repeatable mechanism through which private sector organisations and university students collaborate to produce outcomes that benefit both parties and contribute to building Pakistan's professional and analytical workforce.

NDA

No

Abstract

This is an Experiential Learning Project (ELP) which was practically carried out at Prime Global Energies Limited (PGEL), an upstream oil and gas exploration and production company operating through Joint Ventures in Pakistan. The project was carried out under the guidance of the ELP Faculty Head and in close co-ordination with the Finance team of Prime by four students from the Institute of Business Administration (IBA), Karachi. The main goal of the project was to execute the Actual versus Budget variance analysis for FY2024 and FY2025 for each of the three different cost structures: corporate branch, operating joint ventures and non-operating joint ventures. To achieve this, the team created three finance models and analytical tools that tackle common operational issues in Prime's Finance function. The first delivered was a Manual Accruals Model for Prime's three non-operating JVs: Sawan, Miano and Latif. The model receives gross expenditure data from operators, calculates the corresponding share percentage and returns the net cost of the Prime, which is then compared to the approved budget, and it returns the accrual amount for month-end close. Key findings are that Sawan's Exploration and Appraisal category has seen a 339% utilisation, largely because of the drilling program on Sawan North Deep, while Miano and Latif are comfortably within budget at 48% utilisation and 19.5% respectively.
The second deliverable was a Branch Cost Variance Model and CFO Dashboard for 23 cost line items in six categories for FY July 2024 to June 2025. Full Year analysis results shows that infrastructure spending is USD 8,817 thousand, which shows a variance of USD 365 thousand, representing a utilisation of 96% of the budget of USD 9,182 thousand. The CFO Dashboard, which was built as an initiative from the CFO, offers leadership with dynamic dropdown controls, live KPI tiles, a Top 5 Variance Drivers section and pre-writing of management commentary. The third deliverable was a Financial Ratio Analysis for Prime International Oil and Gas Company Limited (PIOGCL), the parent company, over 3 years of audited financial statements. The analysis includes 26 ratios across 5 categories and shows that the Company is in a good liquidity position (Current Ratio: 2.69x in FY2025), is moving towards a strong solvency position (Debt-to-Equity: reduced from 3.30x to 0.94x), and has a growing cash position (Rs. 19.8 billion in FY2025 versus Rs. While its profitability margins fell in FY2025 as a result of the lack of the large decommissioning provision reversal that boosted FY2024, it has improved in FY2023. This project fits into the Investment Decision Making thought leadership strand of IBA SBS and aligns to SDG 7 (Affordable and Clean Energy) and SDG 17 (Partnerships for the Goals). The finance team at Prime took all models to use with ongoing. The presenter will discuss and illustrate the following topics: Variance Analysis, Accrual Modelling, Joint Venture Accounting, CFO Dashboard, Financial Ratio Analysis, Upstream Oil and Gas, Pakistan, E&P, PGEL, PIOGCL.

Document Type

Restricted Access

Document Name for Citation

Experiential Learning Project

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