During January 2024, local manufacturing and assembling plants in Pakistan produced a total of 2.27 million mobile handsets, surpassing the 0.24 million imported commercially. This output included 0.72 million 2G phones and 1.55 million smartphones.
Despite a slight decline of around four percent in local manufacturing during 2023, attributed to import restrictions on mobile phone accessories, official data revealed an increase in commercial imports during the same period.
Throughout 2023, local plants manufactured 21.28 million mobile handsets, comprising 13 million 2G phones and 8.28 million smartphones. Meanwhile, commercial imports rose from 1.53 million in 2022 to 1.58 million in 2023. Moreover, during the first half of the fiscal year 2023-24, Pakistan witnessed a significant surge in mobile phone imports, reaching $987.539 million, marking a growth of 138.08 percent compared to the previous year.
In January 2024 alone, mobile phone imports spiked by 10.70 percent month-on-month, totaling $194.928 million, a remarkable 275.15 percent increase compared to January 2023, as reported by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS).
