Islamabad : Taker Dr. Umar Saif, Federal Minister of Telecommunication and IT, speaking at Pakistan’s First Mobile Summit in 2024.
The IT Minister stated during his remarks at the Pakistan Mobile Summit that Pakistan has enormous potential to succeed in the information technology sector.
Pakistan boasts 191 million mobile connections, making it the seventh largest mobile user market globally.
Still, the majority of our cell phones are imported. We must produce them here at home and build a business to export phones built in Pakistan.
During our inaugural Mobile conference today, we presented a detailed strategy to advance the sector. There are 33 phone makers in Pakistan that can provide all of our local demand, which is 25 million phones a year. To help the industry become more globally competitive in terms of pricing, we established a 3% R&D incentive. Additionally, we will be unveiling a proposal to use tariff deferential policies to lower the cost of locally made phones relative to imported phones by manufacturing component phones in Pakistan (local deletion policy). In the upcoming years, our cellphone exports have the potential to become a billion dollar sector.
In the near future, financing plans for cellphones will allow consumers to purchase phones in installments as well.
For the IT and telecom sectors in Pakistan, it is a monumental day. Today, three significant milestones were accomplished in cooperation with China Mobile, PTCL, SCO, PTA, De CIX, PEACE Cable, and PTA:
1. China will now begin to route its Internet traffic through Pakistan as a result of our agreement, establishing Pakistan as a regional connectivity center. Pakistan will profit greatly from this Internet transit traffic.
2. Etisalat has established the nation’s first carrier-neutral IXP and data center in an effort to improve internet connectivity dependability.
3To manage the operations of this new data center, PTCL will collaborate with the IXP operator and the German data center DE CIX. Now that we have a top-tier data center operator in Pakistan, we can offer local content hubs for services like Netflix, YouTube, and TikTok in addition to super-scaling cloud services like AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure.
4. Internet users in Pakistan may now access local services, and the country has the potential to develop into a regional powerhouse for connectivity.
Leading players in the telecom business, SIFC officials, and mobile phone makers were present at the summit in addition to the IT Minister. This event was graced by a number of notable figures, including Mr. Anwar Kabir, CEO of Brand Spectrum, Ehsan Saya, Managing Director of Daraz, Muhammad Imran Saleem, Country GM of Careem Pakistan, Fatima Asad-Said, CEO of ABACUS, Major General (R) Hafeez ur Rehman, Chairman PTA, and others.
