PHOTOGRAPHY is fiercely restricted inside Khawaja Masood Akhtar’s factory in Sialkot, a small city in northern Pakistan. His products—top-of-the-range footballs—must be zealously guarded until the time comes for his customers, big international sports brands, to unveil their offerings for the new season. Until then the latest ball designs are subjected to a battery of tests in windowless laboratories. They must endure everything from hard poundings from mechanised boot studs to repeated dusting with fungus spores. The quality of the factory’s output is so high that Adidas chose it as one of only two in the world to manufacture the balls used in the World Cup in 2014.

Pakistan has precious few globally competitive exporters, but a good number of them are clustered in Sialkot, an out-of-the-way city of fewer than 1m people in north-eastern Punjab. It supplies the world with all sorts of sporting gear, from hockey sticks to judo suits, as well as leather goods and surgical instruments. Sialkoti Lederhosen are all the rage in Bavaria. The city’s 8,000-member chamber of commerce says Sialkot exported $2bn-worth of goods last year, or 9% of the country’s total exports of $22bn.

Sialkot’s success is especially surprising as it was cut off from its natural economic hinterland, the Kashmir Valley, when the subcontinent was split between India and Pakistan in 1947. Yet it is doing much better these days than the rest of the country. Its exports have remained reasonably steady for the past two years, even as those of the country as a whole have fallen by 12%. How are firms from such a backwater thriving, ask the exporters of Lahore and Karachi, while they struggle?

Pakistani businesses tend to blame the government for the country’s feeble export performance. Domestic and foreign investors alike are put off by the breakdown of law and order in Karachi, the commercial capital, and the storm of Islamic militancy across the rest of the country (a suicide attack on a police training college on the outskirts of the city of Quetta claimed over 60 lives this week). Manufacturers must endure crippling shortages of electricity in the summer and gas in the winter. Antiquated land administration and customs systems make buying property and exporting goods tiresome. It can take almost three years to settle a commercial dispute. Pakistan ranks a lowly 144th out of the 190 economies assessed in the World Bank’s latest “Doing Business” report.

Mr Akhtar, however, dismisses these “lame excuses”: any half-decent entrepreneurs, he insists, should be able to find their own solutions to such problems. That is what the businessmen of Sialkot have done, at any rate: instead of waiting for politicians to stump up for local infrastructure, they have built it themselves. The Chamber of Commerce set up the country’s first privately financed dry port, where goods can clear customs before being shipped to a conventional port. It later charged members a special fee to raise funds to contribute towards the resurfacing of the city’s once-appalling streets. Local businesses also funded the construction of the city’s airport, the only private one in the country. It boasts both the longest and hardiest runways in the region, and handles 53 flights a week. That helps bring in foreign buyers who do not fancy the wearisome drive from Lahore. Some of the investors in the airport are now on the verge of launching their own airline.

As well as determination, Sialkot’s businessmen have had their fair share of luck. The city happens to specialise in niche products, which are relatively insulated from competition from China. The nearby towns of Wazirabad and Gujrat, once known for their cutlery and electrical goods respectively, have struggled against a tide of cheap Chinese exports. But even Sialkot is not immune to competition. Local manufacturers lost their grip on the world market for badminton rackets when they failed to anticipate the switch from wood to aluminium and graphite. If anything, however, that has only made the Sialkotis more vigilant. The local business community is now trying to set up a technology university in the city.