Local manufacturing plants have manufactured/assembled 3.44 million mobile handsets during the first four months (January-April) of 2023 compared to 0.3 million imported commercially.

The official data suggests that local manufacturing plants have manufactured/assembled 0.63 million mobile handsets during April 2023 compared to 0.03 million imported commercially.

Local manufacturing plants manufactured/assembled 21.94 million mobile 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 letters of credit (LCs).

Around 21.94 million mobile handsets were assembled during the calendar year 2022 – compared to 1.53 million commercially imported phones handsets, says the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA).

The locally manufactured/ assembled 3.44 million mobile phones handsets included 2.79 million 2G and 0.65 million smartphones.

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

The country imported mobile phones worth $473.287 million during the first 10 months (July-April) of the current fiscal year 2022-23, registering a negative growth of 73.84 percent when compared to $1.809 billion during the same period of last year.

Pakistan’s mobile phone imports declined by 28.69 percent on a month-on-month (MoM) basis in April 2023. They stood at $10.587 million compared to imports of $14.846 million in March 2023, according to data released by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS).

Mobile phone imports registered 95.03 percent negative growth on a year-on-year (YoY) basis in April 2023 when compared to $212.881 million in April 2022.

Source: Pro Pakistani