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After achieving 94% local assembly in mobile phones, Pakistan has a new phone manufacturing policy. What does it hope to achieve?
Almost all phone companies in the world have their models locally assembled in Pakistan except Apple. Can the new policy take the industry from local assembly to complete local manufacturing?
By
Usama Liaqat
The last time Pakistan introduced a policy for the manufacturing of mobile phones was in 2020. At the time, almost 70% of all phones in Pakistan were imported. In the six years since, the share of locally assembled phones in the Pakistani market has risen to close to 95%.
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It is an impressive achievement in some ways, but only the beginning in others. The near-complete shift towards local assembly means it only took a few years for tech companies to set up assembly lines and provide cheaper models to the market with the same brand names. The PTA issued 37 manufacturing licenses in this time, and nearly all phone brands in the world are now locally assembled in Pakistan, with the most glaring exception being Apple.
Of course, local assembly does not mean local manufacturing. Local assembly simply means that all the components of the devices are imported and then they are put together in Pakistan. It is similar to how Pakistan’s automobile market works. To drive real growth, the core components, or at least some of them, need to be produced from scratch in Pakistan and then assembled. In the case of Pakistan’s automobile market, it has been nearly half a century of the industry stuck in the assembly stage and unable to move towards true localisation.
Mobile phones, of course, are a different ballgame. They are a smaller, high volume, and low margin product. Their size and ubiquity are what allowed so many investors to put up their hands to assemble them locally. As such, moving towards local manufacturing could be possible as well, but will require significant investment and regulatory cooperation.
That is why the government has introduced a new policy for local manufacturing of mobile phones and electronics. The policy, which will run from 2026-33, has been drafted by the Engineering Development Board (EDB) and a final version has been dispatched to the Prime Minister for approval. But what is the state of Pakistan’s mobile industry, what will the policy do to encourage localisation, and how long could it take?

