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.
