As the Cabinet’s Economic Coordination Committee (ECC) has already approved the policy to encourage local development of the device, Pakistan will soon start assembling cell phone handsets.
Tax rates for high-end mobile devices have been boosted under the scheme, while tax rates for low-end handsets have either been reduced or removed.
According to an official from the Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunications, IT exports have risen 40 percent in the last six months. The inflow target for export remittances for 2020-23 was US $5 billion.
He said IT grew faster, received valuable foreign exchange, created high-paying employment, increased national competitiveness and quality of life through creative solutions for technology.
This could be derived from the fact that export remittances consisting of computer services and call center services from IT & IT allowed services (ITeS) rose to US $1.
As of November 30, 2020, the number of PSEB registered IT & ITeS companies was 2,746, compared to 2,121 valid registrations as of November 2019. The main markets for Pakistan’s IT industry are currently North America, the UAE and the UK, he said.
He said Pakistan’s IT industry has exported goods and services to more than 100 countries and counts among its daily customers the world’s largest companies. It was Pakistan’s economy’s biggest net service export sector, he said.
He said the IT sector in Pakistan had the bandwidth to provide state-of-the-art IT products and services and thus had the ability to raise Pakistan’s much-needed foreign exchange earnings significantly.
