ISLAMABAD: Local manufacturing plants have manufactured/assembled 4.88 million mobile handsets during the first four months (January-May) of 2023 compared to 0.41 million imported commercially.

The official data suggested that local manufacturing plants have manufactured/assembled 1.44 million mobile handsets during May 2023 compared to 0.11 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, said the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA).

The locally manufactured/ assembled 4.88 million mobile phones handsets included four million 2G and 0.88 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 $ 516.488 million during the first 11 months (July-May) of the current fiscal year 2022-23, registering a negative growth of 73.46 percent when compared to $ 1.946 billion during the same period of last year.

Pakistan’s mobile phone imports increased by 308 percent on a month-on-month (MoM) basis in May 2023 and stood at $ 43.201 million compared to imports of $ 10.587 million in April 2023, according to data released by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS).

Mobile phone imports registered 68.52 percent negative growth on a year-on-year (YoY) basis in May 2023 when compared to $ 137.212 million in May 2022.

The overall telecom imports into the country stood at $ 860.441 million during July-May 2023 and registered 66.87 percent negative growth compared to $ 2.597 billion during the same period of the last fiscal year.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2023