Daily Times

President, Islamabad Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ICCI) Ahsan Zafar Bakhtawari Tuesday urged the government to formulate a more attractive and conducive mobile phone policy to encourage the local production of smart phones, as Pakistan could earn billions of dollars by increasing their exports.

He said that the mobile phone manufacturing industry was currently the fifth largest industry in the world with an annual sales revenue of over $500 billion, but Pakistan’s share in it was negligible, so there was a great need for the government to promote local production of smart phones by providing better incentives to the investors. While expressing his views after inaugurating an outlet of mobile phones, he said that China’s annual exports of mobile phones were more than $150 billion and if the local production of smart phones in Pakistan was better encouraged, the country could earn billions of dollars from their exports, said a press release.

He said that currently about 30 companies were engaged in local assembling and manufacturing mobile phones in Pakistan and in 2022, more than 20 million mobile phones were assembled and manufactured in Pakistan, including many international brands like Samsung and Nokia.

However, Pakistan is a big market for mobile phones because the number of mobile phone subscribers in our country is over 190 million. Therefore, the government should pay special attention to increase the local production of smart phones to precious forex reserves and make significant increase in exports. Mian Akram Farid, former President ICCI, said that Pakistan was mostly dependent on textiles and few other products for exports, due to which our annual exports were still limited to 25 to 30 billion US dollars.

He said that the time had come for the government to encourage the production of value-added products, including the mobile phones, so that instead of running the country on debt, Pakistan could emerge as a strong economy by rapidly increasing exports. Sardar Yasir Ilyas Khan, former President ICCI demanded that the government to revise taxes on the telecom sector to attract more investment in this sector.

He said that the imposition of high taxes on telecom services including the mobile calls was a major hurdle in the better development of this industry.