How Tecno built Pakistan's largest phone factory

The brand that came out of nowhere

Muzamil opens the conversation by admitting something the top one or two percent of Pakistan rarely sees. Tecno, he says, “came out of nowhere.” Drive through any city and the banners are everywhere on the buildings; talk to almost anyone working for you and the phone in their hand is a Tecno or one of its near-rivals. But for the slice of the country that upgrades from an old iPhone 6 or 7, the brand is close to invisible. The episode is an attempt to understand how a company that registered almost nothing with the wealthy became, in his telling, one of the top two phone sellers in the country.

His two guests are the people who would know: Adeel Tahir, who heads sales, and Ali Raza, who heads marketing. Both have spent their careers inside the unglamorous middle of the Pakistani phone business. Adeel’s path is its own argument — he started at Samsung in 2004 when “nobody knew” the brand and Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and LG owned the room, then went through Huawei’s device launch, a local brand, and Q Mobile before joining Tecno in 2018. He has a pattern, he says: he keeps joining companies “in a starting phase” and helping scale them up.

Building the factory before the policy

The most counterintuitive fact in the conversation lands early, and Muzamil flags that most people have it backwards. The common story is that a government policy arrived and manufacturers followed. Adeel says it happened the other way around.

When Tecno was still importing finished units, every conversation with the government stalled on the same point — no international company had actually put money on the ground, so why write a policy for one that might never come? Tecno’s answer was to remove the excuse. It convinced its Chinese headquarters to invest first. Delegations came, negotiations ran, and in 2019 the company put up what Adeel calls the first smartphone factory in Pakistan, in Karachi, through a joint venture. “We took a risk,” he says, “which in hindsight paid off.” Only once the investment, the technology transfer, and the resident Chinese engineers were visible did the policy follow.

The policy then pulled the rest of the industry in behind it. PTA’s duty-paid registration system — the one where a phone that hasn’t cleared its duty won’t activate — forced tax onto handsets and made local assembly the rational choice. The result is a near-total conversion. “We can proudly say,” Adeel notes, “today Pakistan has 31 factories with licenses. Almost 94% of the phones in Pakistan are made in Pakistan.”

A brand for the masses, by design

Muzamil presses on the obvious worry about “a brand for the masses” — that it really means low value, dated technology, a phone that’s cheap because the parts are several generations old. Adeel pushes back on both the framing and the assumption.

The strategy, he says, comes from knowing exactly who Tecno is. The group is in more than 70 countries and ranks among the top five phone manufacturers in the world — all of it built “without having presence in the US, even China or Europe.” That is the deliberate inversion. A normal international brand launches in America, then Europe, Australia, the Middle East, and reaches Pakistan last. Tecno runs it backwards, going first to developing markets where buyers have real income constraints and where a phone might represent five or six months of saving. For that buyer, value for money is not a slogan. The same philosophy made Tecno number one in Africa, helped along by a specific piece of software work: tuning the camera so that group photos of people with darker skin tones could be properly differentiated, a problem the bigger brands had not solved.

On the price gap to a flagship, Adeel is blunt. Above a certain tier — the five- or six-lakh phones — “whoever has to buy it will buy it.” But for a phone around two lakh, the same technology already exists: the same processors, the same memory, similar Sony or Leica sensors, aluminium and steel bodies. “Usability ke hisaab se, technology ke hisaab se” there is no major difference. The price difference, he argues, is brand value — the same two-thousand-rupee shirt that costs twenty thousand with a logo on it. His advice to buyers is unusually honest for a salesman: if you’re spending around two lakh, you are better off not buying the most expensive brand.

Where the real difference is made

Ali Raza takes the point somewhere more useful than specs. The consumer, he says, “knows himself too good now.” Marketing only works if it hits a real pain-point. A chef needs water resistance and durability, not a portrait camera. A creator needs the camera and the AI filters that feed TikTok and Instagram reels. The job is to find the want and the need, not to broadcast a key selling point nobody asked for.

Both guests converge on the thing they feel went under-discussed: after-sales service. Adeel puts it as strongly as he can. A brand “cannot even exist” in Pakistan without a comprehensive service network, because the user here is hard on the device — bad weather, rough conditions, a phone that falls off a bicycle. Tecno runs its own company-operated service centres in more than 15 cities, with an in-phone app listing helpline numbers and local addresses, and a software fix often handed back within the hour. There’s a 12-plus-one warranty — a thirteenth month, counted from the activation date locked into the software when the SIM first goes in — and parts availability of at least two to three years, backstopped by China when local inventory runs out.

Muzamil ties it to a pattern he’s seen elsewhere in consumer electronics: products are now easy to copy, so what differentiates a brand long term is the relationship it builds after the sale. He recounts his own driver’s repair ordeal — the budget-phone charging port that breaks, the days of “excruciating pain” getting it fixed — as exactly the experience a brand that owns its service network should be able to remove.

The foldable that doesn’t look like a Tecno

Midway through, the guests pull out the product the conversation has been circling: the Phantom V foldable, with a flip model alongside it. Muzamil opens it and treats it as a near-tablet — seven inches unfolded — with an aerospace-grade hinge that the company holds a patent on, designed so the screen reads as a single plane when open. Preorders start 27 October, with general availability 3 November, at a price the guests call “very competitive” and Adeel estimates at around 200,000 rupees.

The launch is on par with the global release, not lagging it, and most units are imported initially while case machinery and R&D move toward local assembly “eventually, like cars.” Muzamil’s honest reaction is the point of the segment: “I’m sorry to be saying this, but this doesn’t look like Tecno.” Which is precisely the bet — the next move up-market, made while staying true to the affordable core.

The software underneath

The camera conversation opens into a quieter argument about where the real engineering now lives. When the hardware is the same everywhere, Ali says, “it’s not the sensor game, it’s the computational algorithmic processing.” Tecno runs HiOS, a proprietary layer on top of a standard Android base, and the company’s imaging — including how it uses the white light from an RGBW sensor for night photography — sits in patents on that layer. Muzamil extends it: increasingly it’s not the lens but the AI neural engine in the processor that enhances a picture in real time. The brand that owns both hardware and software, he notes, also owns a continuous relationship with the user long after the sale — which becomes the seed of a longer thread about credit and buy-now-pay-later that both sides agree needs telcos, financiers, and licences to actually build.

From assembly to a real export industry

Muzamil steers the back half toward the economy, because this is where assembly stops being the achievement and starts being the floor. Import substitution worked. The harder question is localisation: in a high-value product like a phone, most of the cost is components, so true dollar savings — and any export competitiveness — require building a local components ecosystem, not just bolting parts together.

Adeel frames the prize with numbers. Vietnam exports about $40 billion in phones a year; India $8–10 billion, with most iPhone 15 units now made there; China $120 billion. Capture even 10% of China’s figure and Pakistan has a $12 billion export industry — achievable, he argues, not by chasing every major player but by strategically landing two or three. The on-ramp is unglamorous: localise packaging, chargers, cables. He can already see cottage industry forming around connectors and wires, and notes that data cables alone move hundreds of millions of dollars between companies.

He’s honest about the friction. Pakistan’s labour is cheap but its labour efficiency is lower than China’s; there’s no local raw-material ecosystem, so material is shipped from China or Vietnam through Hong Kong, assembled here, then exported via Dubai — “two times, three times the logistic cost.” But solutions exist, and he and Muzamil agree they shouldn’t be subsidies, which the country is now tired of paying. Adeel reaches for examples: Brazil simply required phones to be locally assembled to be sold at all, using market access as the lever. Indonesia redirected fuel subsidy toward EVs. UAE turned COVID into a creator-economy magnet by following the rules cleanly and inviting the world in. His own proposal is a small levy on the industry that funds an incentive for local components — the sector paying for its own deepening.

The geopolitical window

The conversation’s most forward-looking turn comes when Muzamil brings in something he’d heard the day before, about an auto policy and the way geopolitics quietly redraws opportunity. Doors closing on China, he argues, don’t stop China working — they reroute demand. He cites a European Union report identifying around ten industries it wants to de-risk away from China, telecom among them, and reads Pakistan’s position off the map: with the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean both hostile to China, Pakistan sits well placed to route an industry toward Central Asia, the Gulf, Iran and Turkey, and onward to Europe.

The electric-vehicle boat, he thinks, Pakistan may have missed. Phones are a quicker window — the right policy, the right partners, the right investment could carve out a counter-space fast, and that 10% target stops sounding aspirational. Adeel agrees the timing is real, and adds the precondition both guests keep returning to. The Chinese bosses, he says, want to invest; what shatters their confidence is instability. “We just need a stable environment,” he says — the talent and the potential are already proven by the factory itself.

Pakistan in 2050

Muzamil closes with the question he asks every guest, with his usual caveats: no leaning on the youth bulge, no “ifs” — extrapolate from the data in front of you. Adeel answers as an optimist who has now lived through what policy effectiveness actually feels like, and lands on self-discipline and consistency: the will exists, the stable environment is what’s missing. Ali hopes for a more welcoming, open country that finds its true identity, and predicts “one of the most creative hybrid economies in the world.” Adeel adds a closing note on China, CPEC, and agriculture, and a piece of advice that doubles as the episode’s thesis: the solutions already exist across the world. Korea took technology transfer from the US, China took it too. “We don’t have to reinvent the wheel. We just have to look at them and implement them.”