Pakistan Telecom Sector Gets $1.314 Billion Foreign Invest July-Dec

[fatman17]

Pakistan Telecom Sector Gets $1.314 Billion Foreign Invest July-Dec

KARACHI -(Dow Jones)- Foreign investment in Pakistan's telecom sector witnessed a 7.2% growth on year in the first six months of the current financial year that began July 1, government data issued Wednesday showed.


During the July-December period, foreigners invested $1.314 billion in the country's telecom sector compared with $1.225 billion during the same period last year, Islamabad-based Pakistan Telecommunication Authority said in a report.

During the last four years, the telecom sector has attracted over $5 billion as foreign direct investment, the report said.

-By Haris Zamir, Dow Jones Newswires; 91-11-41207627
(END) Dow Jones Newswires

 

[EagleEyes]

Telecom indeed has been doing great. Its just ONE sector. Imagine if all sectors worked like this.

 

[fatman17]

Telecom indeed has been doing great. Its just ONE sector. Imagine if all sectors worked like this.

if only we can get our act together!

 

[maqsad]

Telecom indeed has been doing great. Its just ONE sector. Imagine if all sectors worked like this.

If all sectors worked like telecom then Pakistan's external debt would be at least $200 billion instead of $38 billion. The only reason that foreigners are crowding to invest in the telecom sector is because they know for every $1 billion they invest, at least $10 billion will be returned to them in 15 years and most of it will be sucked out of pakistan.

 

[maqsad]

if only we can get our act together!

On the surface this great expansion of cellular technology looks very good when you see people walking around with fancy high tech phones but last year the pak govt itself said that under the surface, for a country like pakistan this was a total disaster. Cellular hardware(state of the art newest tech) has an extremely high value added by manufacture ratio and it also has a very high rate of upgrade demand from consumers. This means disaster for a low income export-weak country like pakistan.

This could have been fixed from the beginning by not allowing GSM technology and relying on older CDMA and TDMA equipment which can be purchased at rock bottom prices on the market. Also, GoP should have created laws that would force cell companies to assemble and repair their hardware using pakistani labor and subcontractors. But this whole lucrative market was just given away and pakistan as a whole got ripped off!

Here is last year's report by Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA)'s about what a disaster it has been and continues to be:

Cellphone imports cost $1bn annually -DAWN - Business; November 18, 2007​

Cellphone imports cost $1bn annually



By Jamal Shahid
​

ISLAMABAD, Nov 17: Pakistan spends about $1 billion annually on the import of cellular mobile handsets, which is not only a burden on the country’s foreign reserves but increases the trade deficit as well, said Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) in its annual report 2007.

The report said that the exponential growth in the country’s fastest growing telecom industry was burdening the overall imports.

In the last four years Pakistan spent $1.7 billion on the import of cellular mobile handsets. In 2006-07 imports of the telecom sector were about 4.4 per cent of the total imports compared to only 2.4 per cent in year 2003-04.

Imports of cellular mobile sets with battery shot up from $144.1 million in 2003-04 to $670.2 in 2006-07. Similarly other telecom apparatus imported into the country went up to $677.5 million in 2006-07 compared to $234.8 million in 2003-04.

Pakistan is striving to decelerate the imports, PTA said in its report. Imports for 2006-07 were targeted to decline by 2.1 per cent. However, the total imports registered 6.8 per cent increase in 2006-07 ($30.5 billion) compared to previous years’ imports ($28.5 billion).

The authority said that the telecom equipment imports were one of the reasons for increasing the trade gap.

According to the report the government was considering giving incentives to leading manufacturers of cellular mobile handsets and telecom equipment to consider manufacturing mobile sets and other equipment locally where more than two to three million subscribers were being added on cellular mobile networks every month.

According to PTA estimates, cell phone companies could exploit another 40 per cent of the target market.

PTA claimed that the business environment in the country had been conducive for foreign direct investments (FDI) for the last few years and the trend was expected to continue into the future.

According to the PTA report, about 20 per cent of the mobile users changed their hand sets thrice a year, 20 per cent every two years while 13.3 per cent changed handsets 5 times, 6.1 per cent 11 times and so on.

During 2005-06, telecom sector received over $1.8 billion FDI and emerged as the only sector of the economy to attract such a huge investment.

 

[solid snake]

They should put a ban on expensive new models of cellphones from being imported.

 

[MIG_ACE]

They should put a ban on expensive new models of cellphones from being imported.

And give a huge impetus to smugglers and black marketers. Read my lips.Such policies don't work..Period. We tried that in India and learnt it the hard way.