LAHORE: Chainstore Association of Pakistan (CAP) and Pakistan Software Houses Association (P@SHA) have been closely collaborating to ensure timely execution of the action items deliberated as part of the National E-commerce Policy with the Ministry of Commerce (MoC) for over a year.

Pakistan’s retail trade for 2019~20 was estimated to be PKR 7 trillion (16% of GDP) as per Pakistan Bureau of Statistics. Presently, the ‘organized retail sector’ comprises approximately 8-10% of the entire trade and has been growing over 20% annually for the last decade. With 82% teledensity and 95 million internet users in the country (double the population of Spain) as per Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), it is believed that the traditional commerce and retail will significantly shift towards e-commerce and modern retail. As per the recent State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) data, the total value of domestic e-commerce transactions in the country have risen to over PKR 350 billion (estimating 90% COD) in the last four quarters up to Q1’2021 with 35% growth over the previous period. Therefore, e-commerce as a proportion of total retail in Pakistan is estimated to be at 0.55% compared to the global average of 15%.

It is also imperative that the conventional back-end operations and processes in the manufacturing, warehousing and distribution value chain of the retail sector must be modernized with cutting-edge technology and software.—PR

Copyright Business Recorder, 2021