49 lakh mobile phones manufactured in 1st five months of 2023

During the first five months of 2023 (January to May), local manufacturing plants in Pakistan have successfully manufactured or assembled 4.88 million mobile handsets, surpassing the commercially imported quantity of 0.41 million. The official data for May 2023 indicates that local manufacturing plants produced 1.44 million mobile handsets, while the number of commercially imported handsets stood at 0.11 million.

Out of the 4.88 million mobile handsets manufactured or assembled locally, 4 million were 2G phones, and 0.88 million were smartphones. In terms of imports, Pakistan imported mobile phones worth $516.488 million during the first eleven months of the current fiscal year (July to May), showing a significant decline of 73.46 percent compared to $1.946 billion during the same period last year.

In May 2023, Pakistan’s mobile phone imports experienced a substantial month-on-month increase of 308 percent, reaching $43.201 million, compared to imports of $10.587 million in April 2023. However, on a year-on-year basis, mobile phone imports witnessed a negative growth of 68.52 percent in May 2023, as they amounted to $137.212 million in May 2022.

The overall imports in the telecom sector in Pakistan for the period of July to May 2023 amounted to $860.441 million, showing a negative growth rate of 66.87 percent when compared to $2.597 billion during the same period in the previous fiscal year.