Pakistan is continuing its push toward value addition and local assembly of mobile phones, with local companies playing a key role in the sector’s growth. According to Zeeshan Mian Noor, CEO of a local mobile manufacturing company, 97 percent of mobile phones are now being produced locally in Pakistan, a figure that points to how far domestic assembly has scaled up in recent years compared to the country’s earlier reliance on imported handsets.
Speaking to Aaj News from a factory in Korangi, Noor said that while Pakistan’s mobile manufacturing policy has been successfully implemented, about 30 to 40 percent of parts globally still come from abroad, reflecting a structural reality of the global mobile phone supply chain rather than a shortfall specific to Pakistan’s own manufacturing capacity. To fully restore mobile phone exports, Noor said there is a growing need to manufacture smaller components locally, since high priced imported parts currently drive up the overall cost of finished mobile sets, limiting the competitiveness of Pakistani assembled phones in export markets.
Noor noted that although a single factory may employ around a thousand workers, many small components still come from China because local manufacturing policies for those specific parts have not yet been established by the government. This points to a gap between Pakistan’s success in scaling up final assembly of mobile phones and its more limited progress in building a domestic supply chain for the smaller components that go into each device, an area that would require dedicated government policy to develop locally rather than continuing to rely on imports. Components such as these can include smaller electronic parts, connectors and other items that individually may seem minor but collectively make up a meaningful share of a phone’s total production cost. Establishing local factories for component manufacturing could significantly increase mobile production, restore exports, create jobs for hundreds of thousands of people, boost the national economy, and increase foreign exchange reserves. This framing positions component manufacturing as a logical next step for Pakistan’s mobile phone industry, building on the assembly capacity already established through the country’s existing mobile manufacturing policy and extending it further up the supply chain.
The comments reflect a broader conversation within Pakistan’s technology manufacturing sector about how to move beyond final assembly toward deeper local value addition, an approach that could reduce the country’s reliance on imported components while creating additional manufacturing jobs. As Pakistan’s local mobile assembly industry continues to expand, the extent to which the government introduces policies supporting local component manufacturing is likely to determine how much further value addition in the sector can grow, and whether the industry can meaningfully restore mobile phone exports in the years ahead, a goal that would depend heavily on coordinated action between manufacturers and policymakers.
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