Mobile manufacturing/assembling: Policy has attracted $300m in investment, created 50,000 jobs in two years

ISLAMABAD: Local mobile manufacturing/assembling has generated around $300 million in investment and 50,000 employments during the last two years i.e. since January 2021.

Official sources revealed that the government had introduced a mobile manufacturing policy to encourage and attract manufacturers to establish their units in Pakistan.

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) in light of the policy issued Mobile Device Manufacturing (MDM) Regulations on 28th January 2021. Till now, 31 companies have been issued MDM Authorisation enabling them to manufacture mobile devices in Pakistan.

The companies included renowned brands e.g. Samsung, Nokia, Oppo, TECNO, Infinix, Vgotel, and Q-mobile etc.

Mobile devices play an important role in the communication and digitalization of the country. The local demand of mobile devices is around 22 million devices per annum. Before the introduction of the mobile device manufacturing policy most of the mobile devices were commercially imported as Completely Built Units, however, the trend has shifted to local manufacturing.

Local manufacturing plants have manufactured/assembled 21.94 million phones handsets during the calendar year 2022 compared to 24.66 million in 2021 i.e. registered a decline, attributable to issues in imports on account of restricting the opening of the letters of credit (LC).

Local manufacturing plants have manufactured/assembled 21.94 million phones handsets during the calendar year 2022 –compared to 1.53 million commercially imported phones handsets, says the PTA.

The local manufacturing plants manufactured/assembled 2.24 million mobile phone handsets in December 2022. The manufactured/assembled mobile phone handsets by local manufacturing plants during the calendar year 2021 stood at 24.66 million compared to 13.05 million in 2020 – a landmark increase of 88 percent.

The commercial imports of mobile phone handsets stood at 10.26 million in 2021 compared to 24.51 million in 2020.

The locally-manufactured/assembled 21.94 million mobile phones handsets included 13.15 million 2G and 8.79 million smartphones.

Besides, as per the PTA data, 56 percent of mobile devices are smartphones, and 44 percent are 2G on the Pakistan network.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2023