Comment by Riaz Haq on August 14, 2021 at 8:44pm

#Pakistan begins #export of #smartphones . After authorisation from Pakistan #Telecom Authority (PTA), Inovi Telecom has exported 5,500 units of 4G smartphones carrying "manufactured in Pakistan" tag to the United Arab Emirates (#UAE). #electronics

https://tribune.com.pk/story/2315622/pakistan-begins-export-of-smar...

"PTA congratulates the company for this landmark achievement. This is the result of concerted efforts for the development of the mobile device manufacturing ecosystem in the country," the authority said in a statement issued on Saturday.

It said that the successful implementation of the Device Identification Registration and Blocking System (DIRBS) and enabling government policies including the mobile manufacturing policy have created a favourable environment for mobile device manufacturing in Pakistan.

"As a part of this policy, Inovi Telecom Pvt. Ltd was issued mobile manufacturing authorisation by PTA on 9th April 2021," it added.

Within four months, according to PTA, the company has managed to export "manufactured in Pakistan" phones.

In recent times, the telecom sector has emerged as a prominent contributor to Pakistan’s economy as its share in the national exchequer soared 129% in 2020 compared to 2019, despite economic pressure arising from Covid-19.

In July, Lucky Motor Corporation entered into an agreement with Samsung Gulf Electronics to produce Samsung mobile phones in Pakistan at its automobile plant at Port Qasim.

In comments to The Express Tribune, Tecno Pack Telecom CEO Aamir Allawala termed the joint venture excellent development for the country

Samsung was a mobile phone giant and its decision to assemble phones in Pakistan was an indication of the success of the Mobile Device Manufacturing Policy (MDMP) launched by the government in June 2020, said Allawala.

The vision of the policy was clear i.e. by 2022, 80% of all mobile phones sold in Pakistan should be locally manufactured, he said.

The brands already being manufactured in Pakistan included Tecno, Infinix, Itel, Vivo, Oppo and Realme while Nokia was in the process of setting up a plant and kick-starting operations in September 2021, Allahwala further said.

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 1, 2021 at 6:27am

#Samsung starts producing mobile phones in Pakistan. #Pakistan imported #smartphones worth $644.673m in first 4 months (July-October) of 2021, up from $557.961m during the same period of last year, registering a growth of 15.54%. - DAWN.COM

https://www.dawn.com/news/1661220


KARACHI: One of the world’s largest manufacturers of mobile phones, Samsung, has finally started production in Pakistan, lifting hopes of the authorities and the industry that this would cut down the import bill of the country in the months to come.

The development came to light on Tuesday at a meeting of the company’s top managers with the Senators who visited the production site in line with the plan to receive a briefing on the growing new sector and challenges ahead for the cellphones manufacturing industry in Pakistan.

“We were informed that Samsung has formally started its production,” Faisal Subzwari, chairman of the Senate’s Standing Committee on Industries and Production, told Dawn.

He headed a delegation of members of the Senate panel which visited Samsung’s production unit and an auto manufacturing plant, and held a meeting with the management of Export Processing Zone.


The company aims to manufacture around 3m handsets every year

“It’s really good to know that the company has started production within a short span of four months,” Mr Subzwari said. “We visited the production facility which was designed on modern lines and obviously the local manpower, support of local industry and conducive environment provided by the government led to such achievement. But still I believe that we need to move forward from just growing in the assembling area to localisation of the industry.”

The country has witnessed robust growth in local production of cellular phones. During the first 10 months of this year, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) data says, the production of mobile phones by local manufacturing plants has almost doubled to 18.87 million against the import of mobile phones which stood at 45m.

However, despite the increase in local production of mobile phones, the import remained on a higher side. The PTA data says that mobile phones worth $644.673m were imported during the first four months (July-October) of 2021 compared to $557.961m during the same period of last year, registering a growth of 15.54 per cent.

The industry believes that it may take time to achieve the desired results but with the fresh start in an absolutely new industrial avenue, things have finally started moving in the right direction.

“With production of around 250,000 to 300,000, we aim to produce around 3m cellphones every year,” Mohammad Ali Tabba, chief of the Lucky Group which partners with Samsung to produce cellphones in Pakistan, told Dawn. “The whole production line is manual with no robotic assistance. So you can imagine how much workforce is required offering employment in this absolutely new area of engineering in Pakistan.”

He agreed that the country needed to move towards localisation from its current status of assembling industry and believed it was more the role of the industrial sector than the government to go for modification and compatibility.

“It’s not only the local production of cellphones but also a host of opportunities which it brings. From employment to investment and from export opportunities to local capacity building, it carries immense potential,” said Mr Tabba.

Comment by Riaz Haq on March 12, 2022 at 5:21pm

#Pakistan businessman hints at #iPhone plant in the country. Local #manufacturing could reduce import tariffs to make its best iPhones more affordable and accessible in the country. #Apple saves around 22% on import duties by making its phones in #India https://www.imore.com/pakistan-business-leader-hints-iphone-plant-c...

Pakistan business leader Javed Afridi says he is in talks with Apple to bring an iPhone assembly plant to the country.

Afridi made the revelation on Twitter in response to a question from journalist Shiffa Yousafzai:

Afridi is best known as the owner of Pakistan's MG JW Automobile, and the CEO of Haier & Ruba. He is also the chairman and owner of Pakistani T20 cricket franchise Peshawar Zalmi. Haier is a leading Pakistani supplier of home appliances and tech including laptops and LED TVs.

The murmurings could be reminiscent of a similar deal Apple did in India in order to onshore iPhone assembly in the country there. Like India, iPhones and other Apple products sold in Pakistan are subject to high import tariffs if they aren't made locally, driving up the price.


If Apple was able to set up some form of manufacturing it could reduce the impact of these tariffs to make its best iPhones more affordable and accessible in the country. Apple saves around 22% on import duties by making its phones in India instead of importing them. It would also help Apple reduce its reliance on its supply chain in China, a weakness highlighted by the pandemic which saw heavy disruption to supply in the early part of 2020. Like India, Apple could also consider using phones made in Pakistan for export as well as the local market.

Apple announced its new iPhone SE earlier this week, featuring 5G and the A15 chip from the iPhone 13, a great budget option at just $429.

Comment by Riaz Haq on May 22, 2022 at 7:06am

#Pakistan Manufactured 9.72m #MobilePhones Locally in First 4 months of 2022. 53 % of mobile devices are #smartphones and 47 % are 2G. Pakistan imported mobile phones worth $1.810 billion in first 10 months of FY22 compared to $1.684 billion in FY21 https://www.phoneworld.com.pk/locally-manufactured-phones-2022/

In the month of April, the units manufactured/assembled 2.56 million mobile phones against 0.25 million imports. In 2021, Pakistan has manufactured/assembled 24.66 million mobile phones locally as compared to 13.05 million in 2020.


The country also witnesses a decline in the imports of mobile phones. In 2021, the country imported 10.26 million mobile phones compared to 24.51 million in 2020.

Among the 9.72 million mobile phones, 5.69 million are 2G and 4.03 million are smartphones. According to PTA data, 53 % of mobile devices are smartphones and 47 % are 2G on the Pakistan network.

Although the industry has seen significant growth in mobile phone production, still we are lagging behind in some terms. For instance, Pakistan imported mobile phones worth $1.810 billion during the first ten months (July-April) of 2021-22 compared to $1.684 billion during the same period of last year, registering a growth of 7.43 per cent.

According to the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS), the overall telecom import increased by 14.05 per cent from (July-April) 2021 to 22.

Comment by Riaz Haq on July 20, 2022 at 4:26pm

Pakistan’s Mobile Imports Decline by 4% to $1.9 Billion in FY22

https://propakistani.pk/2022/07/20/pakistans-mobile-imports-decline...

Pakistan imported mobile phones worth $1.978 billion during the fiscal year 2021–22 compared to $2.065 billion during the same period last year, registering a negative growth of 4.19 percent, according to the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS).

The overall telecom imports into the country during the period under review, i.e., fiscal year 2021–22, increased by 3.52 percent by going up from $2.593 billion in June–July 2020–21 to $2.684 billion during the same period last year.

On a month-on-month basis, imports of mobile phones into Pakistan decreased by 76.52 percent during June 2022 and stood at $32.221 million when compared to $137.213 million imported in May 2022, according to the PBS data.

Furthermore, on a year-on-year basis, mobile phones witnessed an 84.26 percent negative growth when compared to $204.677 million in June 2021.

On a month-on-month basis, the overall telecom imports into the country decreased by 52.80 percent during June 2022 and stood at $86.843 million, when compared to the imports of $183.985 million in May 2022.

Likewise, on a year-on-year basis, overall telecom imports witnessed 66.11 percent negative growth when compared to $256.255 million in June 2021. Other apparatus imports during July-June 2021-22 increased by 33.65 percent and stood at $705.945 million compared to $528.190 million in July-June 2020-21.

Other apparatus imports registered 16.78 percent growth on a month-on-month basis and stood at $54.622 million in June 2022 compared to $46.772 million in May 2022 and registered 5.90 percent growth when compared to $51.578 million in June 2022.

Comment by Riaz Haq on July 20, 2022 at 4:27pm

Can #Pakistan become the next #tech #manufacturing hub? #Samsung is now assembling all its top #smartphones, except for the foldable Z-Series, in Pakistan. Pak can save some of over $2 billion spent on #mobile #phone imports last year.#technology @TRTWorld https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/can-pakistan-become-the-next-tech...

A number of smartphone companies, including Samsung, have set up assembly plants in Pakistan in the past year. But this nascent industry is facing local challenges.
Along a dusty pot-holed road in Korangi industrial estate, one of Karachi’s designated factory zones, sewage runs in open drains, rag pickers collect plastic bottles, and car mechanics sweat at makeshift workshops.

It’s a June day with a temperature topping 35 degrees Celsius. Tempers flare up easily. Trucks loaded with textiles and chemicals zoom past, leaving a cloud of dust in their wake.

Incessant and prolonged electricity breakdowns mean many factory workers are sleep-deprived. Few can afford to lose daily wages in Pakistan, where the government struggles to bring in much-needed foreign investment to stabilise its fragile economy.

But amid this chaos, men and women donning blue and pink coats and special slippers walk through a passageway of one of the factories where a ventilation system blows dust specks off their clothes before they enter a long corridor flanked by different workstations. This is where Premier Code, a Pakistani company, manufactures smartphones.

“We need to be very careful about the environment in which we work. Karachi’s weather is different. There’s a lot of dust. So we make sure everything is clean. Our workers are not even allowed to bring water bottles where the phones are assembled,” says Nauman Amjad, the factory manager.

“We import parts from China and then assemble them here. But we have our own SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures), which employees follow to put the components together,” he tells TRT World.

Workers skillfully attach charging jacks and cameras to the motherboard as the phones — known as Dcode in the market — move along the assembly line. Plumes of cold air seep out of air humidifiers placed at various workstations.

Just a few years back, all mobile phones in Pakistan were imported. That changed two years ago when the then-government introduced a policy incentivising local assembly of the phones via tax rebates and other measures.

In 2021, local manufacturers produced 24.66 million handsets and imports drastically decreased, according to the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), the industry regulator.

Samsung, the world’s largest smartphone maker, now assembles all its top brands, except for the foldable Z-Series, locally.

Local manufacturing and contract assembly mean Islamabad can slow the drain on its foreign exchange reserves. Pakistanis spent more than $2 billion on importing cell phones last year.

A high import bill and debt repayments have depleted official coffers and forced policymakers to try and negotiate a loan with the IMF.

With more than 114 million 3G and 4G subscribers, Pakistan has a large young population hooked on apps like TikTok and PUBG, which has increased the demand for smartphones.

Imposition of high tax on the import of mobile phone sets and tax rebates for local assembly has encouraged investment, according to industry professionals.

The PTA has issued licences to more than two dozen companies to assemble phones for the domestic market.

Contract manufacturing, wherein large brands such China’s Xiaomi outsource the assembly of phones to companies in countries like Vietnam, is not new.

Vietnam has emerged as one of the leading countries in the assembly and export of smartphones and other tech products in the past decade.

Apple recently moved part of its iPad manufacturing to Vietnam from China, where Covid lockdowns have disrupted supply chains.

Comment by Riaz Haq on July 20, 2022 at 4:27pm

In Pakistan, Samsung’s local outsourcing contractor is Lucky Motors, which assembles KIA cars and is part of a large business conglomerate.

“It’s only in the last five to seven years that the smartphone business has mushroomed in developing countries like ours,” says Quentin D’Silva, the head of Lucky's smartphone division, adding that smartphone usage has surged in the country following the introduction of 3G and 4G cellular services in 2014.

A matter of training

When D’Silva was helping set up the assembly unit in Bin Qasim, a special economic zone on the fringes of Karachi, he and his team had to follow Samsung's strict guidelines to uphold its manufacturing standards.

“My production manager, who worked for Reckitt Benckiser, visited a Samsung facility in Indonesia and he tells me they run it like a pharmaceutical company,” where extreme hygiene and cleanliness standards are maintained, he says.

A smartphone like Samsung’s S22 comprises thousands of intricate components such as chipsets designed and manufactured at sophisticated facilities in South Korea and a handful of other countries.

Putting the components together is the relatively easy part. Workers can be trained over a few weeks to follow the SOPs of Apple or Samsung correctly. Motor skills and speed are built gradually over time.

A bigger challenge in a country like Pakistan was changing the mindset of the nearly 700 people the company employs, says D’Silva.

“I’m not going to oversimplify the assembly part. But the training starts off with the concept of quality,” he asserts.

Customer satisfaction is a top priority for the South Korean tech giant and that means workers need to make sure the finished product is packed neatly without even a bubble of air or a speck of dust on its wrapping, he notes.

Samsung started production in Pakistan late last year and between January and May, 2022, it produced 1.2 million smartphones, including the S22 Ultra, the latest in the series.

Depending on the model, it takes workers between 13 and 18 seconds to put together a Samsung phone as it moves along an assembly line, according to D’Silva

"Our production drops if, for instance, our workers go for lunch and are 10 minutes late. That’s where the discipline comes in.”

Moving beyond

Mobile phone assembly in Pakistan picked up its pace two years ago when the government increased taxes on smartphone imports. Simultaneously, the local industry was encouraged to import spare parts and assemble them domestically for the local market.

More recently, mobile phone imports have been banned as Islamabad tries to halt the rupee depreciation — one of the consequences of imports outweighing the revenue from exports.

Contract manufacturing generates employment and cuts down imports. But some local companies want to create brands and design their own products in the long run.

Premier Code says it’s investing approximately two to four percent of its revenue on research and development to gear up for the future.

“It’s not possible to localise production of all the components. Only a handful of companies make LCDs (the screens). Chipset manufacturing is primarily done in Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, the US and to a lesser extent in China,” says Muhammad Naqi, Premier Code’s CEO.

His company focuses on the design side of things, such as the layout of the printed circuit boards (PCBs), investing in proprietary software and the exterior look of the phones.

At the company’s factory, Dcode mobiles are subject to strict testing. Random samples are picked from each finished batch to undergo a durability test, which includes dropping spherical metal balls onto the phone’s screen and then dropping the device on the marble floor.

Naqi says his company is not a contract manufacturer. “We want to develop our own brand and products at the same time” — even if the components are shipped from elsewhere.

Comment by Riaz Haq on July 20, 2022 at 4:28pm

Pakistani companies have been building PCBs — the green-coloured boards on which chips and resistors are mounted — for years for appliances such as televisions and air conditioners.

“But you need to understand that their layout is really big. When it comes to smartphones, it's a very small layout, which requires precision engineering. Our machines are not able to do that,” says Naqi.

High-tech machines used for making PCBs for mobile phones will mean higher capital costs and a thin factory workforce — undermining a vital goal of the government's policy, which is to create employment.

Nevertheless, a few tech companies are trying to challenge that view. One of them is located not far from Premier Code’s facility.

All about small steps

Elite Lighting manufactures parts for LED lights. Their products are nowhere close to the technologically advanced components that smartphone manufacturing requires.

But Yousuf Farooq, a young director at the company, has big dreams.

“Pakistan imports 100 million LED lights annually. It’s a huge market that we can capture,” he says.

Founded in November 2020, the company designs and fabricates PCBs for things like LED lights, watches and circuits that go into petrol pump dispensers.

“People were importing LED parts and putting them together here. We said, “Why don’t we build them here?”

At his 50-employee factory, workers place blue and black cylindrical components on the PCBs and solder them together. Known as ‘through-hole components’ such as resistors and capacitors, they are mostly imported from China.

But Farooq says his company can make them locally as the company grows and more orders come in.

“We started off by placing 9,000 components an hour on the PCBs. Now we can place 25,000 components. Almost all our workers were unskilled. We trained them over a period of 6 months.”

The Pakistani rupee’s depreciation, which has involved a 30 percent loss against the US dollar since July 2021, has made it feasible for local manufacturers to compete with importers.

LED light sellers pay their Chinese suppliers 60 to 90 days before the shipments arrive, says Farooq.

“Imagine if we can deliver the same product in 15 days and we deal in cash. So what has happened is that it improves the cash cycle of our customers.”

“Our customer can also just walk into my office and talk to me if something goes wrong. He doesn’t have to worry about learning Chinese,” he chuckles.

Rising wages in China have also made local manufacturers competitive. On average, Lucky and Premier pay between Rs30,00 and Rs35,000 (around $165) a month to their workers.

But the nascent industry is already facing a crisis. In recent weeks, banks have refused to extend credit which companies need to import components. That’s because of the fast-depleting foreign currency reserves that Islamabad is trying to preserve.

Lucky Motors, Samsung’s contract assembler, hasn’t been able to manufacture a single phone in almost a month.

“To say that Samsung people are upset is going to be an understatement,” says D’Silva, the CEO.

Comment by Riaz Haq on August 1, 2022 at 8:34pm

PTA confirms 14 Million mobile phones manufactured locally during Jan-Jun 2022


https://www.phoneworld.com.pk/14-million-mobile-phones-manufactured...


According to the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, 14.08 million mobile phones manufactured during the first six months (January-June) of 2022, compared to 1.14 million imported commercially (PTA).


In June 2022, local manufacturing plants produced/assembled 1.67 million mobile phone devices. Local manufacturing facilities produced 24.66 million mobile phone handsets in calendar year 2021, up from 13.05 million in 2020, representing an 88 percent increase. According to PTA data, commercial imports of mobile phone handsets rose at 10.26 million in 2021, up from 24.51 million in 2020.

The 14.08 million mobile phones manufactured/assembled domestically include 8.06 million 2G and 6.02 million smartphones. According to PTA data, 54 percent of mobile devices in Pakistan are smartphones, while 46 percent are 2G.Overall telecom imports into the country surged by 3.52 percent over the time under evaluation, from $2.593 billion in July-June 2020-21 to $2.684 billion during the same period last year.

The effective implementation of the Device Identification Registration and Blocking System (DIRBS), in conjunction with supportive government regulations, such as the mobile manufacturing policy, has provided a favorable climate for mobile device manufacture in Pakistan.

It has also benefited Pakistan’s mobile ecosystem by minimizing the bogus device market, creating a fair playing field for commercial organizations, and building consumer trust through the development of standardized legal routes for all types of device imports.

Comment by Riaz Haq on May 7, 2023 at 6:39pm

Mobile policy attracts 36 companies to manufacture smartphones in the country

https://profit.pakistantoday.com.pk/2023/01/23/mobile-policy-attrac...


Like the auto industry in Pakistan, the mobile phone industry has also attracted at least 36 companies to manufacture/assemble smartphones under the policies introduced by the government in 2020.

According to officials, the ‘Make in Pakistan’ policy introduced by the previous Imran Khan government has resulted in the establishment of 31 companies which manufacture a great number of renowned international mobile phone brands in the country.

As per the data, local manufacturing plants have manufactured over 19.7 million phone handsets during the first 11 months of 2022 compared to just 1.37 million commercially imported phone handsets. Data provided by the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) reveals that the local manufacturing plants assembled 1.56 million mobile phone handsets in November 2022

Despite the increase in local production, the country imported mobile phones worth $ 290.57 million during the first five months (July-November) of the current fiscal year 2022-23. However, this was a decrease of 66.08 percent when compared to the imports of the same period last year at $ 856.73 million.

To review further expansion and issues related to the newly flourishing industry, the Ministry of Industries & Production (MoI&P) will hold a mobile device manufacturing summit on Tuesday (today). As per the officials of the Engineering Development Board (EDB), the relevant department of the MoI&P is jointly organising the summit in collaboration with the Pakistan Mobile Phone Manufacturers Association.

The summit will be addressed by the Federal Minister for Board of Investment, Chaudhry Salik Hussain, and will also include an exhibition of technology and products by the members of association including Xiaomi, Realmi, Infinix, Tecno, Itel, Alcatel, G-Five, Oppo, Vivo, Premier Code etc. The exhibition will be open for targeted general public.

According to officials, the purpose of organising this summit-cum-exhibition is to get input from all the relevant stakeholders which includes mobile device manufacturers, government officials from MoI&P, PTA, Ministry of Commerce, National Tariff Commission, Board of Investment, Ministry of IT & Telecom, Federal Board of Revenue and academia to boost local assembly of mobile devices through enhancing investment and employment opportunities in this sector.

The summit will focus on the localisation of parts and components used in mobile manufacturing, localisation of allied equipment like laptops and tablets, targeting export of mobile phones and promoting ease of doing business in Pakistan. The mobile device manufacturing sector is expected to benefit from this summit as it will facilitate further collaborations with international counterparts which can enhance the competitiveness of the sector.

The mobile device manufacturing policy was formulated by EDB in 2020 with the aim to promote local manufacturing of mobile devices in Pakistan and to provide an attractive environment for investors under the “Make in Pakistan” policy of the government.

According to data by PTA, 55 percent of the mobile devices in the country are smart phones while the remaining 45 percent are on 2G Pakistan network.

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