Pakistan eyeing to boost cell phone exports

Adviser to the Prime Minister on Commerce and Investment Abdul Razak Dawood on Wednesday said that after achieving “big success” in the manufacturing of mobile phones last year, Pakistan was now seeking expansion into exports.

Pakistan, a net importer of mobile phones prior to 2016, produced 22.12 million handsets during January-November 2021 and imported 9.95 million during the same period, data from the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) shows.

In 2020, Pakistan’s import of mobile phones was 24.51 million compared to 13.05 million sets produced locally.

Various Chinese mobile phone manufacturers have played a key role in Pakistan’s production boom in 2021, according to the PTA.

Local manufacturing plants assembled 9.03 million smartphones while the number of 2G mobile phones was 13.09 million.

“I would say that our whole venture into manufacturing mobile phones has been a big success,” Dawood said in an interview with Arab News on Wednesday.

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“It has been very successful because we now see that every month the number of mobile phones coming into the country is decreasing and the numbers that are being produced and sold locally is increasing.”

The PM’s aide said the record levels of local manufacturing were achieved under a new “conducive policy” introduced by the current government.

The Mobile Device Manufacturing Policy 2020 set a 49 per cent localization target by June 2023, including 10 per cent localization of parts of the motherboard and 10 per cent localization of batteries.

“We have developed a policy for local assembling of mobile phones … We are currently looking at becoming a world-class assembler of mobile phones,” Dawood said.

“We are right now concentrating on low-end mobile phone sets and we hope that soon we will be able to start getting into high-end phones with world-class companies.”