Telecom boom
There is much hope that by the second half of 2022, Pakistan will feature among one of the fastest growing mobile phone exporters in the world. This is because the country’s telecom sector is witnessing a “paradigm shift” with foreign shipments of mobile phones increasingly contributing to the economy through “foreign exchange earnings, employment generation and transfer of technology”. As a result, the import of completely built mobile units has dropped from 28.02 million handsets in 2019 to 10.3 million as of now.
These are indeed encouraging signs that could give Pakistan the boost it needs in terms of gaining foreign investments and securing foreign projects — with a Chinese smartphone manufacturer already having made a handsome profit just a year after investing $16 million. This can have a reverberating effect that will bolster Pakistan’s tech and digital revolution. Infrastructure will be developed in the form of factories and assembly lines which will in turn create jobs of technicians, engineers and other employees, thereby helping with unemployment. Moreover, prices of smart phones have dropped to about 40% to benefit the end-consumer as a large population of youth are involved in purchasing cutting-edge technological devices. Here the incumbent government must look to revise the insurmountable amount of tax imposed on the purchase of smartphones in order to further facilitate growth.
It is hoped that foreign investment secured from this can be injected into the economy to provide relief to the people. The government must also simultaneously encourage companies to develop infrastructure through which broadband high speed internet services are available across the nation. This will increase the net of 100 million cellular users which can spark the attention of investors. This might just be the trump card that PM Imran Khan could use. However, it is essential to realise that development and economic prosperity are of no use if the masses are not able to reap its benefits, meaning smartphones should be cheap and accessible, and internet services should be made readily available across the country.
Published in The Express Tribune, February 28th, 2022.
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