Govt focusing on e-commerce to promote knowledge economy

Islamabad: Government was focusing on e-commerce to move forward towards digital Pakistan and promote knowledge economy through a Digital Pakistan Policy to facilitate growth of e-commerce.

Member (IT) Ministry of Information Technology and Telecom, Syed Junaid Imam, addressing as chief guest at an e-commerce summit said this market has enormous potential in Pakistan due to exponential growth in broadband subscribers to over 95 million. The summit was organised by the Islamabad Chamber of Commerce and Industry in collaboration with Daraz Pakistan.

Senator Mian Muhammad Ateeq Sheikh, Osman Nasir Managing Director Pakistan Software Export Board, Ehsan Saya Managing Director DARAZ and many other dignitaries were present at the occasion. Over 400 participants including traders and university students attended the e-commerce summit.

Daraz team registered a large number of sellers on its digital platform to enable them to start online sale of products. This was the first ever e-commerce summit organized by ICCI in collaboration with Daraz with the intention of moving the economy towards digitization in line with PM s vision of Digital Pakistan.

Sardar Yasir Ilyas Khan, President, ICCI said Amazon’s net sales in 2020 was over $386 billion, Alibaba Groups around USD 72 billion and eBay’s over $10 billion, which showed that this business model has a great future. He said that e-commerce sales China was over 22 percent of its total sales and India’s 7-8 per cent, but e-commerce sale in Pakistan was just 0.5 per cent of its total sales, which showed that Pakistan still remained an untapped market for e-commerce and urged that traders should capitalise on this untapped market for achieving fast growth in business. It was informed that Daraz has over 70,000 successful sellers nationwidewith 20 million products in over 100 categories, 2600 Daraz Dukaans, over 65 Daraz hubs and 5 state of the art warehouses. Daraz is operating in over 100 cities with a distribution network in over 600 cities. They said that Daraz was a digital platform that connected sellers with buyers for 24/7 business activity and it was operating in 5 countries including Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Myanmar and Sri Lanka.