Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has said it has issued Mobile Device Manufacturing (MDM) regulations and has started receiving applications for mobile device manufacturing.
In a statement issued on Wednesday, PTA said that the implementation of the authority’s Device Identification, Registration and Blocking System (DRIBS) in 2019 had resulted in significant increase in legal import of mobile devices and establishment of over 33 local assembly plants of mobile devices in Pakistan. These plants have produced over 25 million mobile devices including 4G smartphones since the implementation of the system.
The PTA said that with the successful execution of DRIBS, the local assembly industry had evolved from infancy to growing stage, with significant growth seen in local assembly of smartphones.
In 2019, only 119,639 smartphones were assembled locally whereas in 2020, the number of such devices grew to 2.1 million. It is important to highlight that the end of the second month of 2021, around 1.21 million smartphones had been assembled in Pakistan.
In the light of the tremendous impact of DRIBS, the government has introduced a comprehensive Mobile Manufacturing Policy to encourage and attract manufacturers to Pakistan and establish their plants.
The PTA has issued MDM regulations and has started receiving mobile device manufacturing applications. This initiative will help create more jobs in this technical sector, as well as enable consumers to buy locally manufactured mobile devices.
The PTA said that the country had the distinction of implementing the world’s first open-source, full-fledged DRIBS. This system has the ability to identify all IMEIs latched on Pakistan’s mobile networks and to categorize them based on their compliant status.
