Privacy notice

Who we are

Al-Ukaz is a national trade platform headquartered in Islamabad, operating under the endorsement of the Ministry of Commerce, Government of Pakistan. This notice covers the pre-launch website only. Once accounts and the supplier directory open, a fuller notice will replace it.

What we collect, and when

We collect information in one place on this site: the register-interest form. Nothing else on these pages asks you for personal data, and we do not require an account to read anything here.

Only your email address is required. Everything else is optional and exists so we can route you to the right sector desk rather than send you a generic reply.

• Email address — required. Used to contact you and as the unique key for your record.
• Name — optional.
• Company name — optional.
• City — optional.
• Sector — optional.
• WhatsApp number — optional.

The form also carries a hidden field used to catch automated submissions. If it is filled in, the submission is discarded and nothing is stored. People never see or fill this field.

Why we hold it

To contact you about membership, verification and onboarding, and to direct your enquiry to the right part of the team. You provide it voluntarily by submitting the form, which states that you are authorising us to contact you about membership. We do not use it for advertising and we do not build profiles from it.

Where it goes

Submissions are sent to our own application programming interface and stored in our database, in a table reserved for registration interest. Your email address is the unique key, so submitting the form again updates your existing record rather than creating a second one. We record the date you first registered and the date the record last changed.

We do not sell your details, and we do not share them with other manufacturers or with buyers. They are accessible to the Al-Ukaz team, and to the infrastructure providers that host our application and database, who process data on our instructions in order to run the service.

How long we keep it

Until you ask us to remove it, or until it is no longer needed for the purpose above. Your record carries an unsubscribe flag, so you can ask us to stop contacting you without your details being deleted outright — or ask for deletion, which we will action.

What you can ask for

• A copy of what we hold about you.
• Correction of anything that is wrong.
• Deletion of your record.
• That we stop contacting you, without deleting the record.

Email hello@al-ukaz.com from the address you registered with and we will action it. If you write from a different address we may ask you to confirm ownership of the original one, so that nobody else can request changes to your record.

Creating an account

Creating a full Al-Ukaz account is separate from registering interest, and involves submitting company documents for verification. That process is not covered by this notice; the terms and privacy notice governing it will be published before accounts open to the public.

Changes to this notice

If what we collect or how we use it changes, we will update this page and change the date at the top of it.