Number of mobile users in Pakistan reaches 90 million

KARACHI: The number of the users of mobile phone in Pakistan has reached from 0.3 million to about 90 million during the last eight years.

According to the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), the ratio of mobile phone users all over the country has been increased from 0.22 per cent in 2000 to 54.70 per cent in June 2008.

As per PTA, there are 88.1 million mobile phone users out of the country’s population of 165 million while they were 306,000 in 2000.

State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan that in 2007 the total number of mobile subscribers in Pakistan reached 76.6 million. He is reporting from an interesting statistical compilation of achievements compiled by the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA); (more number from this report are included below).

I ask the questions I do in the headline not out of cynicism but out of very honest inquisitiveness. I deal a lot with development related statistics in my professional work and for many reasons the number seems rather surprising to me. It probably is that the meaning of “subscriber” here is different from what I would have expected or that I am unfamiliar with the specifics of how this number is calculated and what it signifies. If so, I am eager to learn. I also wonder to what extent massive growth in mobile phone subscribers is necessarily good for a developing country like Pakistan?

The average cell phone is used for about a year
The average cell phone price has been about $100 over the last 8 years (on the lower side probably)
The CAGR has been around 226% to get us from 300K to 90M users
Then you are led to conclusion that Pakistanis have spent almost $16BN on cell phones in the last 8 years. That’s over $2BN a year just on the cell phones themselves, representing about 10% of the trade deficit in the current year, but a much bigger percentage of the trade deficit during this entire 8 year period! Some of you will want to argue with me about non-linear growth blah blah blah. I understand all that. This is a simplified estimate and if you reduce the number of phones, I can argue for an increase in the average price. Point is, the final number is in this ballpark.
What is inexcusable, looking at this, is the fact that there is NO cell phone manufacturing happening in Pakistan! Clearly, $16BN in revenue is enough enticement for ANY cell phone manufacturer to setup shop locally. It’s incentive enough for some level of vertical integration where much of the supply chain could justifiably reside in Pakistan. None of this has been done, and in a nutshell, it’s bloody shameful. It has had very negative economic impacts that could have simply been avoided. I wonder if anyone at the PTA or Ministry of Communications is reading this and whether they will move off their behinds and fix it.