Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz has urged the Western companies to outsource to Pakistan and use it as their manufacturing hub for exporting goods to the region. In an interview with The Sunday Times, one of the leading British dailies, the prime minister said: "Pakistan has a stable political environment, and is a better place for western companies to outsource than India or China."
The British daily said the Pakistani government is going all out to persuade western businesses to use the country's cheap labour and land to make money.
"Use Pakistan as a regional hub for manufacturing and then export, because the location is unique. The challenge now is one of implementation and making things work better. The Pakistan of today and tomorrow is not the Pakistan of yesterday," the paper quoted him as saying.
"When the world was taking off in the 1980s and 1990s, we were busy with internal politics. This did not provide the continuity that a developing country needs," Aziz said. This year Pakistan's exports are set to hit 14 billion dollars and President Pervez Musharraf is predicting that the GDP growth will rise from 6.7 percent to 7.5 percent, said the paper.
The paper said: "President Musharraf is talking the language that big business likes to hear." Last Wednesday evening, he told delegates to the Expo that 700 foreign companies were operating in the country, and they were all making double-digit returns - some were making 50 percent. He said the hourly labour rate is only $0.37 (20p) in Pakistan, lower than India ($0.58) and China at ($0.67).
"Pakistan is the venue for the best possible returns on any investment," the president was quoted as saying.
The newspaper said a Manchester firm called Drill corer has just moved production of its drills to Pakistan. "The result is that it can now sell them for 15,000 pounds rather than the 65,000 pounds it would have to charge if they were produced in Britain." Honda is moving two motorcycle factories to Pakistan.
For the past two years Pakistan's manufacturing sector has been growing at more than 15 percent a year.
The British daily said foreign investment, led by America and Britain, has been growing at 100 percent a year.
It said the country has just issued its second international bond, this time raising $600m, an issue that was two times oversubscribed. The Karachi Stock Exchange was the best-performing exchange in 2003 and last year it rose a further 50 percent.
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