The State Bank’s December 27, 2022 circular documents earlier requirements for banks to obtain prior permission for import transactions involving Chapters 84 and 85 and certain Chapter 87 items. It withdrew those requirements effective January 2, 2023, while setting out categories banks could prioritise and directing them to consider customer risk and foreign-exchange liquidity. This establishes a restrictive financing framework and its subsequent modification; it does not, by itself, prove that a particular Samsung shipment was stranded at Karachi Port or establish exact shutdown dates for Lucky Motor’s line. sbp.org.pk
Contemporaneous industry reporting also linked Pakistan’s weaker mobile-phone assembly in 2023 to restrictions on opening LCs for accessories. The disruption therefore has an evidentiary basis, but a temporary interruption during a foreign-exchange crisis cannot automatically be carried forward as a description of the industry in October 2026. Business Recorder
The political allegation that all these problems were exclusively one finance minister’s doing is broader than the documents establish. Accountability should follow dated decisions, their implementation and their consequences. Reducing a sequence of monetary, fiscal and commercial constraints to one name may produce an effective political exchange, but it does not produce a dependable industrial history.
Taxation Is a Current Competitiveness Concern
The strongest evidence on taxation comes from a July 22, 2026 government account of a meeting with Samsung’s Pakistan delegation. The delegation highlighted changes in taxation and a narrowing tariff differential between semi-knocked-down kits and completely built phones, which it said had significantly reduced the competitiveness of local production. That is more specific and useful than an unsupported claim that every benefit under the manufacturing policy had disappeared. pid.gov.pk
The economic concern is straightforward: if assembling a phone locally requires investment, staffing, testing and working capital, the commercial advantage must be sufficient to justify those commitments. A narrowing advantage over importing finished phones can weaken that incentive. The exact burden, however, depends on the applicable rules and product category, so regulatory duty, sales tax and withholding tax should not be treated as interchangeable labels or added together without a documented calculation.
The same government release records Commerce Minister Jam Kamal Khan encouraging Samsung to develop Pakistan as a manufacturing, refurbishment and export hub. That invitation concerns expansion and value addition; it is not evidence that Samsung had no existing assembly operation. The release explicitly describes Samsung’s investment in local assembly. pid.gov.pk
Is the Galaxy S25 Ultra Assembled in Pakistan?
The S25 Ultra question exposes the difference between evidence and inference. The supplied discussion includes owners saying their devices were assembled in Pakistan, alongside a February 2025 Samsung Members thread specifically discussing a Pakistan-made S25 Ultra. Another indexed Samsung Members discussion contains an owner’s statement that their S25 Ultra was built by Lucky Motors. These are relevant customer reports, but a community hosted on Samsung’s website remains a user forum rather than an official production bulletin. Samsung Members
The defensible conclusion is that owner reports support the presence of locally assembled S25 Ultra units, while the reviewed company disclosure directly confirms earlier flagship assembly. The evidence reviewed here does not establish the origin of every S25 Ultra batch. It also does not justify a confident declaration that the model is never assembled in Pakistan.
The pasted AI answer makes precisely that mistake: it finds evidence of production in Vietnam, India and South Korea, then treats those locations as an exhaustive list. Evidence that a model is assembled in one country does not prove that it is never assembled elsewhere. A Vietnam-labelled handset establishes the origin of that handset, rather than the origin of every handset bearing the same model name.
The S26 Ultra and Fold claims need their own verification. Neither earlier S-series assembly nor an owner’s report about another generation settles the origin of those devices. A legible label tied to the exact model and batch, supported where possible by confirmation from Samsung Pakistan or Lucky Motor, would be substantially stronger than either an AI summary or an unsupported denial.
What the Attached Screenshots Actually Show
The first attachment, image(3).png, displays a Google answer claiming local production of 18.66 million phones between January and August 2026, alongside an 87%–95% domestic-demand range. It shows a truncated Express Tribune source chip and a separate Facebook-linked attribution. The production total matches the retrieved reporting, but the percentages refer to different periods and should not be presented as one undifferentiated measure. Its broader assertion that locally assembled phones are 15%–20% cheaper requires model-specific comparisons before it can be applied to Samsung’s entire range.
