In 2022, with the leading role of Chinese manufacturing companies, Pakistan has locally assembled/manufactured about 20 million mobile phones in the country, which outnumbered phones imported from other countries.
Gwadar Pro on Sunday quoting Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA)’s data, stated that between January and November, the locally assembled/manufactured phones include 11.5 million 2G sets while the number of smartphones is 8.2 million.
On average, manufacturing per month during the first 11 months of the year is 1.8 million phones; thus, the inclusion of December data will bring the overall data to over 20 million phones in 2022.
In 2022, like the previous two years, Chinese companies are amongst the top local manufacturing/assembling brands.
The PTA data shows that a Chinese mobile company manufactured/assembled 2.74 million; VGO TEL which is a subsidiary of Transsion Holdings manufactured 2.10 million phones; China’s Vivo manufactured/assembled 1.66 million phones while Infinix, another subsidiary of Transsion Holdings, manufactured/assembled 1.61 million phones. Similarly, Oppo has manufactured 1.30 million phones while TECNO has assembled/manufactured 1.05 million phones.
Due to the local assembly/manufacturing of mobile devices, Pakistan has saved foreign exchange reserves, which the country’s economic system badly needs.
In 2022, Pakistan commercially imported 1.37 million devices while in 2021 the number of imported devices was 10.26 million while that of local manufacturing/assembling was 24.66 million. In 2020, the number of imported devices was 24.51 million, which was much higher than the 13.05 million locally assembled/manufactured mobile sets.
Domestically manufactured/ assembled phones outnumber imported phones when PTA issued the Mobile Device Manufacturing Authorizations (MDMA) to several foreign companies to set up their manufacturing/assembling plants in Pakistan.