ORAWEK Morning Brief — Monday, 17 August 2026

Bangladesh’s business and policy community got two very different timelines for the power and gas crisis in the space of 48 hours. On Friday, Prime Minister Tarique Rahman apologised for a record-breaking bout of load-shedding and told the country he hoped the situation would “improve significantly within the next few days.” On Sunday, his own finance minister put a much less comforting number on the same problem: at least two years.

Both men may be telling the truth. Gas pressure can genuinely stabilise week to week — as it did within hours of Summit’s LNG terminal resuming supply last Thursday — even as the underlying infrastructure deficit takes years to close. But for any business trying to plan capacity, financing, or hiring around Bangladesh’s energy outlook, the gap between “a few days” and “two years” is exactly the kind of thing worth building into your assumptions rather than glossing over.

Khosru’s Correction

Speaking at an AmCham event at the InterContinental Dhaka on Sunday, Finance and Planning Minister Amir Khosru Mahmud Chowdhury said resolving Bangladesh’s power and gas shortages fully would take a minimum of two years. He attributed the scale of the problem to infrastructure inherited from previous governments and to inadequate transmission capacity — Bangladesh, he said, can generate a meaningful amount of power, but cannot always move it to where demand sits.

On the immediate front, Khosru said decisions on floating LNG terminals and onshore storage facilities were being finalised and would be announced “within the next few days” — echoing the PM’s language from Friday, but tied to policy decisions rather than to the supply picture itself. The government’s longer-term plan is an “integrated energy mix” combining renewables, gas-based power, and continued reliance on coal, which Khosru said was “more or less finalised.”

He also used the platform to flag a second structural problem: the banking sector. Many banks, he said, face severe capital shortages and high levels of non-performing loans, to the point that some depositors cannot withdraw funds and businesses are struggling to secure working capital. Recapitalisation, in his framing, will require “a combination of government support and foreign fund management,” because the losses involved are too large for the national budget to absorb alone.

AmCham president Syed Mohammad Kamal, also speaking at the event, said American member companies have invested roughly $5 billion in Bangladesh over the past 20 years and are targeting another $5 billion over the next four to five years — contingent on what he called investors’ three interconnected priorities: energy, finance, and predictability.

The market is already pricing in the longer timeline

The Dhaka Stock Exchange didn’t wait for confirmation. DSEX fell for a third consecutive session on Sunday, losing 23.9 points to close at 5,860 — down from 5,884 the previous session — even as turnover rose 22% to Tk11.3 billion. Market commentary explicitly cited the energy crisis and the absence of an immediate fix as reasons for investor caution, with one securities house managing director noting that “there was no guarantee inflation would not surge in the next quarter” given the fuel situation.

This sits alongside a separate and longer-running trend: foreign investors pulled a net $223 million out of Bangladeshi stocks in FY26, worse than the $138 million outflow in FY25. Net foreign portfolio investment has been negative every year since FY21. Market participants point to a familiar list of causes — repeated floor-price interventions dating back to 2020 (fully lifted only in June this year), banking-sector stress, a shallow pool of large, liquid, well-governed listed companies, taka depreciation risk, and friction around repatriating profits. There is a genuine silver lining: MSCI has said it will resume regular index reviews of Bangladesh from November, having paused them during the floor-price years, and market participants say new investor interest exists even as net flows stay negative. But as one broker put it, “once investors burn their finger in a place, they cannot forget it easily” — governance and a deeper pool of investable stocks are now the binding constraint, not policy alone.

The RMG sector’s parallel energy problem

The energy story isn’t confined to macro indicators — it’s showing up directly in Bangladesh’s largest export sector. A new CPD (Centre for Policy Dialogue) study, drawing on data from 350 garment factories and 65 types of machinery, found that a typical factory could cut its monthly energy bill by 15.7% — from roughly Tk9.98 lakh to Tk8.46 lakh — simply by meeting 30% of its energy needs through rooftop solar. Machinery upgrades offer a second lever: cutting machines represent only 5.5% of installed capacity across surveyed factories but could unlock 27% of potential replacement savings, while sewing machines make up 85% of the machine stock but offer under 3% savings potential.

CPD’s research director, Khondaker Golam Moazzem, was blunt about the underlying pressure: Bangladesh needs an “emergency response” in energy, as gas reserves near depletion and new exploration fails to keep pace with demand. BGMEA vice-president Vidiya Amrit Khan warned that the sector risks losing competitiveness as EU carbon-reporting requirements — covering emissions, energy use, water consumption, and chemical discharge — become more consequential for exporters heading into 2030.

What came through most clearly at the CPD dialogue, though, was that the obstacle isn’t primarily technological. Panellists pointed to financing constraints for smaller factories, a shortage of capable renewable-energy service companies, and a roughly 17% combined VAT and advance-tax burden on imported renewable equipment that works directly against the government’s own decarbonisation goals. One BKMEA executive noted that even his LEED-certified platinum factory hadn’t received the full benefit of a promised tax incentive, because of how income tax is collected and adjusted in practice. “If the incentive does not reduce the actual tax burden, then what is the point of giving it?” he asked.

A quieter positive: the startup fund and a customs delay study

Two other developments from the weekend deserve attention, both because they cut in a more constructive direction and because they connect to each other.

Startup Bangladesh Limited launched a Tk400 crore “Fund of Funds” aimed at strengthening local institutional capital in the venture ecosystem. The gap it’s meant to address is stark: Bangladeshi startups have attracted around $1.2 billion in investment over the past decade, but local investors accounted for only about 7% of that total. The fund will invest in selected local and international venture capital funds with strong governance and credible investment strategies, and a formal process for eligible fund managers has already opened through a Request for Expression of Interest.

Separately, a Chattogram Customs House analysis presented to Finance Minister Khosru quantified something importers have complained about for years: capital-machinery imports — the equipment needed to build new factories or expand capacity — take an average of 13.3 days to clear through Chattogram port, the longest of any major import category tracked, ahead of commercial goods and toys (11.6 days) and food items (11.1 days). More than half of that time is consumed before customs even receives the Bill of Entry. Importers and clearing-and-forwarding agents account for roughly 75% of the total clearance time, versus 14% for the port itself and 8% for customs — a finding that complicates the usual finger-pointing between customs and the private sector. CCH has proposed shifting more of the administrative work to a pre-arrival stage, which its own analysis suggests could cut post-arrival clearance time to under four days, a model it says has worked well in India.

The connection to the startup fund and to the broader investment climate is direct: a one-day delay in cargo clearance is estimated to cost roughly 1% of trade value, according to research cited in the CCH presentation. For any business — from a garment factory installing new solar-ready machinery to a startup importing servers — port efficiency is as much a part of the “predictability” that AmCham’s Kamal named as a top investor priority as energy policy or banking-sector health.

Banking-sector footnote: LC clearance for a defaulter-linked power plant

In a smaller but telling development, Bangladesh Bank has approved the opening of Letters of Credit for SS Power One Limited — the Banshkhali coal-fired power plant that is 70% owned by S Alam Group, whose owner is now a classified loan defaulter — to be opened through Rupali Bank with a 100% cash margin, valid until December 2027. The central bank has stated it will bear no liability arising from the exemption, and SS Power itself will not be eligible to seek financial assistance from Bangladesh Bank. A senior BB official said the decision, taken jointly with the finance ministry, was made specifically to ensure uninterrupted power supply — an illustration of how directly the ownership tangles in Bangladesh’s banking sector are now intersecting with the energy crisis Khosru described on Sunday.

Economy Watch: Bangladesh’s key numbers, 17 August 2026

Sources: Bangladesh Bank, DSE/BSS, BAJUS, BBS, ADB, Eurostat, Chattogram Customs House — full citations in the daily HTML digest at orawek.com.

What this means heading into the week

Read together, Sunday’s news cycle offers a more honest picture of Bangladesh’s energy and investment climate than Friday’s apology alone did. The power and gas crisis is not a short-term supply hiccup to be smoothed over within days — it is a multi-year infrastructure and financing problem that is already showing up in stock market pricing, in RMG factory cost structures, and in the friction foreign and domestic investors face at every stage from customs clearance to loan classification. The Tk400 crore startup fund and the CCH’s own customs-delay analysis both point toward the kind of structural fixes — deeper local capital markets, faster port clearance — that could meaningfully improve the investment climate independent of the energy timeline. But they are additive, not substitutes.

The practical takeaway for anyone planning budgets, hiring, or capacity into Q4 and beyond: build around the two-year story, not the “few days” one, and treat any near-term relief in gas supply as a bonus rather than a baseline.

This article is part of ORAWEK’s daily Morning Brief, published free every weekday at 8:00 AM Dhaka time. For the full digest including Bangladesh macroeconomic data and global signals with Bangladesh implications, visit orawek.com or subscribe via WhatsApp and LinkedIn.