ISLAMABAD: Local manufacturing plants have manufactured/ assembled 2.81 million mobile handsets during the first three months (January-March) of 2023 compared to 0.27 million imported commercially.

The official data suggests that local manufacturing plants have manufactured/ assembled 0.46 million mobile handsets during March 2023 compared to 0.08 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 2.81 million mobile phones handsets included 2.24 million 2G and 0.67 million smartphones.

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

The country imported mobile phones worth $ 462.701 million during the first nine months (July-March) of the current fiscal year 2022-23, registering a negative growth of 71.01 percent when compared to $ 1.596 billion during the same period of last year.

Pakistan’s mobile phone imports declined by 55.09 per cent on a month-on-month (MoM) basis in March 2023 and stood at $ 14.846 million compared to imports of $ 33.054 million in February 2023, according to data released by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS).

Mobile phone imports registered 91.93 percent negative growth on a year-on-year (YoY) basis in March 2023 when compared to $ 183.894 million in March 2022.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2023