CPEC’s second phase to boost industrialization in Pakistan, says Li Bijian

KARACHI:

Pakistan has introduced one more Chinese brand in the home appliances category, as a local company which is engaged in assembling and marketing brands of the neighbouring country, has expanded its assembly line with two new products.

Speaking at the launching ceremony of Midea (a Chinese brand) in Pakistan on Tuesday, Consul General of China in Karachi Li Bijian voiced hope that the new assembly line would lead to import substitution for Pakistan, besides reducing its import bill and trade deficit.

The trade balance between China and Pakistan has remained heavily in favour of Beijing.

Beijing’s exports to Islamabad have remained significantly higher as compared to imports. However, China has always encouraged and facilitated Pakistan to boost exports globally.

“We have asked Chinese investors to invest more in Pakistan,” Bijian said, highlighting that Chinese businessmen were keen to invest mainly in Dhabeji Special Economic Zone (located in Thatta) and Gwadar Free Zone in Balochistan.

Tri-Angels Electronics (TAE) is already operating assembly lines of Hisense and Trion products and marketing them in the country.

On the sidelines of the event, TAE CEO Imran Ghani underlined that they may export the newly introduced home appliances to Saarc (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) countries in future.

“Midea will do a comparison of the products that will be cheaper from Pakistan to Saarc countries and tell us,” he mentioned.

Both the officials claimed that the newly introduced Chinese brand was a leading name in the category of home appliances.

“With its headquarters in Beijing, the brand is listed at Shenzhen Stock Exchange and is part of the Global Fortune 500 list published in 2021,” they underlined.

The local company has invested $1 million to set up the new assembly line. With this, the company has so far invested a total of $3.3 million, since it introduced Hisense back in 2018.

“There is demand for around half a million water dispensers per annum in Pakistan,” Ghani said.

“The country sells around 0.7 million microwave ovens in a year and is a market of 1.1 million units of split ACs and around 1.4 million units of LED TV,” he added.

Responding to a question, he said that they have shelved the idea of locally assembling and marketing mobile phones “as it takes three to four months to get approval from Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) and by that time new phone sets arrive in the market”.