BEIJING, Stores with various Chinese mobile phone brand logos are common on the streets of many big cities in Pakistan. Behind these logos is the great enthusiasm of Chinese enterprises to participate in the digital construction of Pakistan.
For a long time, Pakistan mobile communication is mainly based on 2G access, facing many shortcomings, such as low transmission efficiency, signal instability, and so on, which cannot meet the needs of Pakistan’s domestic market. In the era of pursuing high efficiency, a “digital revolution” is inevitable.
In May 2018, the Federal Cabinet of Pakistan approved the first “Digital Pakistan” policy submitted by the Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunication (MoITT), which aims to create a fast and innovative digital ecosystem of digital services, information applications, and science and technology services for Pakistan, thus setting off a wave of change, and the development of Pakistan’s digital economy has entered the fast lane.
According to data from the Pakistan Telecommunications Administration (PTA), as of March 2021, the number of mobile users in Pakistan has reached 183 million, with a penetration rate of nearly 85 percent, of which 3G and 4G users have reached 98 million. Chinese enterprises have played an important role in this process.
” We have taken the lead in laying out the 4G network in Pakistan and have been at the forefront of the digital age in Pakistan,” Wang Hua, CEO of ZONG, told China Economic Net(CEN) recently.
ZONG is an international brand created by CMPak, a 100% owned subsidiary of China Mobile Communications Corporation in Pakistan. By this year, ZONG has built more than 14,000 4G base stations in Pakistan and provided high-speed mobile broadband to rural areas of Baluchistan, which will cover 227 unserved areas of Jaffarabad, Naseerabad and Sohbatpur.
“ZONG hopes to take advantage of 4G LTE technology to create a fully interconnected environment and provide reliable and affordable products.” Wang Hua said that ZONG currently has more than 40 million customers in Pakistan, of which 27 million are 3G and 4G users.
On the way of iterative upgrading of mobile communication technology, the change of terminal supply is also imperative. As one of the top manufacturers in Pakistan, OPPO has accelerated the transformation of Pakistan from functional phones to smartphones and from 3G to 4G. George Long, CEO of OPPO Pakistan, told CEN: “When we entered Pakistan in 2014, we were the first and only manufacturer to provide smartphones.”
At present, OPPO covers different levels of market demand in Pakistan, and the price of each phone ranges from Rs 10,999 to Rs 104,999, according to the Pakistani e-commerce website Daraz.pk.
With the completion of the network and the readiness of the terminal, Pakistan’s mobile Internet industry has achieved a leaping development. According to PTA Annual Report 2020,
mobile data usage in Pakistan reached 4498PB bytes (1PB is about equal to 1000TB) in the fiscal year 2020 (July 2019 to June 2020), an increase of more than 77 percent over the same period last year. The report believes that such a large increase is not possible if there is no upgrade of the communication network, etc.
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