By Jun Chen, Feng Liu, Tao Shi and Yifan Zhang
On February 6, 2025, China and Pakistan jointly issued the Joint Statement between China and Pakistan in Beijing, in which the two sides agreed to promote the high-quality construction of the Belt and Road eight actions in Pakistan and align them with the Pakistani side’s 5Es.
The two sides agreed to promote the high-quality construction of the Belt and Road eight actions in Pakistan and dovetail with the 5Es development framework of Pakistan to jointly build growth corridors, livelihood corridors, innovation corridors, green corridors, open corridors, and create an upgraded version of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. Pakistan’s 5Es framework covers five aspects: export, environment, energy, equitable rights restoration, and digital Pakistan. Among these, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) serves as a key driver for digital Pakistan’s development.
Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif, while unveiling the five-year National Economic Transformation Plan on December 31, 2024, clearly expressed his commitment to providing accessible, affordable, high-quality, reliable, and ubiquitous ICT services to enhance the quality of life and economic well-being of citizens. The ICT sector is increasingly becoming the centerpiece of Digital Pakistan, while injecting digital momentum into key areas such as economic prosperity, employment promotion, and civic e-governance.
Despite Pakistan’s ICT industry grows at a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of over 22% and reaching a peak of $342 million in IT exports in a single month in March 2025, development is showing strong momentum. However, the ICT industry as a whole still faces problems such as backward digital infrastructure, strong external dependence on science and technology, and shortage of scientific and technological human resources, which affect the overall development of ICT.
Pakistan’s poor level of digital infrastructure development and inadequate supporting equipment has resulted in slow internet speeds, further widening the technology gap with developed countries. The Pakistan Telecommunication Regulatory Authority (PTRA) 2025 has publicly stated in a report in January that there are problems with network infrastructure development, with 42% of telecom sites not having generators, resulting in over 21,000 sites being vulnerable to power outages.
Pakistan does not yet have commercial 5G coverage, and fiber optic networks and towers are not dense enough, and at the current rate of fixed broadband rollout, it will take 30 years to reach the level of high-income countries. Outdated digital infrastructure has resulted in average internet speeds in Pakistan of only 10-20 megabits per second (Mbps), which is a far cry from the average international standard of 100 megabits per second.
As of October 2024, Pakistan ranked 100th out of 111 countries and territories tested in terms of mobile internet speed and 141st out of 158 countries and territories in terms of broadband speed, with low and unstable speeds hampering the rapid development of information technology.
Pakistan’s insufficient investment in R&D and strong external dependence on ICT limit the overall level of development. Pakistan’s current R&D expenditure accounts for only 0.16% of GDP, much lower than India’s 0.8%, China’s 2.65% and South Korea’s 5.2%, and about 60% of public R&D funds are used for defense research, resulting in a lack of resources for universities and research institutions, making it difficult to transform scientific research results into commercial products.
Semiconductors are an important strategic resource for ICT, but Pakistan lacks indigenous R&D production capacity for semiconductors. Pakistan’s semiconductor imports amounted to $1.1 billion in 2023, making it the world’s 29th largest importer of semiconductor devices, with a high degree of technological dependence on foreign countries. For this reason, in December 2024, Pakistan’s Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunications drafted a Semiconductor Policy and Action, which plans to set up a National Semiconductor Fund with Rs 10 billion to promote the country’s semiconductor industry through grants, subsidies, and incentives in the hope of laying a solid foundation for ICT with semiconductor development.
The growth of the ICT sector in Pakistan is being constrained by a structural shortage of skilled IT personnel. Pakistan has more than 100 million young people under the age of 30, which is about 60% of the population. The demographics should have given Pakistan a huge talent pool in the ICT sector, but the country’s lack of systematic technical training programs has failed to realize their population’s potential, and 10 percent of young people are facing unemployment due to inflation and other factors.
Pakistan’s Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunication (MITT) has pointed out that the country has a significant structural imbalance between the demand and supply of skilled IT professionals. Approximately 75,000 IT graduates enter the labor market in Pakistan every year, but the lack of systematic training programs in the country results in less than 10 percent having the skills required for export-oriented positions. The talent shortage situation limits the ability of Pakistani information companies to compete in the international market.
Kearney’s Global Service Locations Index 2023 ranks Pakistan as the most financially attractive IT outsourcing destination in the world, and the International Labor Organization (ILO) has identified Pakistan as the second largest provider of digital workforce in the area of software development and technical services.
Pakistan’s domestic ICT industry has unprecedented opportunities for growth, but also faces a variety of potential challenges. In the face of the intricate background and international environment, China and Pakistan are working together to bring structural breakthroughs in Pakistan’s ICT field through systematic cooperation across infrastructure construction, technology application scenarios and talent cultivation, and to form an all-round support system for Pakistan’s ICT development.
China-Pakistan cooperation focuses on stable energy supply and efficient infrastructure, which strongly guarantees the foundation of ICT development. At present, China has invested in and put into operation seven coal-fired power stations, five new energy power stations, two hydropower stations and one transmission line in Pakistan, and the installed capacity of the power projects invested in and constructed by China accounts for 19.07% and 24.19% of the total installed capacity of Pakistan’s electric power industry respectively.
Stabilized power supply has improved the situation of network information industry loss due to power cuts in Pakistan. ZonG, a Pakistani subsidiary of China Mobile, has further expanded its 5G network coverage since 2024, with plans to deploy more than 1,500 Huawei Gigabit base stations in Islamabad, Lahore, and other major cities, which can improve the Internet experience of the Pakistani people by 150%, and also reduce energy consumption by 15%, laying a solid foundation for ICT development.
China-Pakistan cooperation in the form of localized training is building a stable and sustainable ICT talent ecosystem. In July 2024, more than 160 China-Pakistan Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) partners launched the China-Pakistan Alliance for Digital Education (CPADE) to focus on Pakistan’s talent gap in the development of digital technology, and to promote the scaling up and specialization of local digital skills training in the form of skills training cooperation.
China’s Huawei enterprise has cooperated with COMSATS University Islamabad, and over the past two years, more than 425 students have taken ICT-related courses, and more than 100 students have successfully passed Huawei’s certification, allowing the employment rate of graduates of related majors to reach as high as 90%. China-Pakistan cooperation effectively addresses the current imbalance between supply and demand of talent, and lays the foundation of human capital for Pakistan’s independent and sustainable ICT development.
China-Pakistan cooperation strives for technology implementation and industry synergy, promoting the integration of Pakistan’s ICT industry into the global market. Huawei is working with Pakistani telecom operator Ufone to commercially deploy a microwave solution (SuperHub) for the first time in the world in 2024, realizing a 50% increase in spectral efficiency, a 100% reduction in signal interference, and a doubling of network capacity, laying a key foundation for cost-effective deployment of Pakistan’s 5G network.
The China-Pakistan Intelligent Systems Laboratory 2024 piloted the application of license plate recognition and intelligent security systems in Islamabad, and develop a drone-assisted edge framework for real-time monitoring of floods, which will significantly improve the efficiency of disaster response and help Pakistan enhance its urban governance capability. The in-depth integration of China’s mature technological solutions and Pakistan’s localized needs will promote the efficient operation of Pakistan’s ICT industry.
Pakistan’s ICT industry has made breakthrough achievements under China-Pakistan cooperation, outlining the strategic depth and practical value of the country’s economic transformation with clear quantitative indicators. The booming ICT industry has improved Pakistan’s long-term dependence on exports of energy and primary products, injected digital vitality into foreign exchange reserves, and with $3.223 billion in ICT service export remittances in 2024 and a trade surplus of $2.827 billion, ICT has become the country’s first service export industry to exceed the $3 billion mark.
In the future, China and Pakistan will use ICT cooperation as the core engine to promote the vision of the Digital Silk Road to a deeper landing. Pakistan announced the launch of the National Fiber Optic Program in April 2025, which plans to cover the country’s 7.5 million households with fiber optic networks in five years, and achieve 80% fiber-to-the-site (FTTS) deployment. This strategic project marks Pakistan’s substantial progress towards the 5G era, and highlights the paradigm upgrade of China-Pakistan cooperation from traditional infrastructure to digital ecological co-construction.
At the same time, Pakistan is also making precise breakthroughs in the ICT field, writing a leap from infrastructure beneficiary to digital co-constructor, and proving that developing countries are fully capable of carving out their own growth channels in the wave of globalization through endogenous innovation with solid achievements in the ICT field.
Jun Chen, Liu Feng, Tao Shi and Yifan Zhang are scholars at Southwest University of Political Science and Law, P. R. China.
The Diplomatic Insight is a digital and print magazine focusing on diplomacy, defense, and development publishing since 2009.
