Islamabad, Dec 5: Compared to $607.37 million in October of last year, services exports increased 13.43% to $688.95 million in October. With the exception of August, when there was a 6.5 percent decline, the rise has resumed since February of this year, mostly as a result of higher exports of information technology.
According to data released by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics on Wednesday, exports increased by 12.34 percent to Rs191.3 billion in October compared to Rs170.281 billion in the same month the previous year.
Compared to $2.41 billion during the same period previous year, services exports increased 7.91 percent to $2.60 billion during July-October FY25. Services exports increased by a meager 2.77 percent to $7.8 billion in FY24 from $7.59 billion in the same period the year before.
Services exports increased by 2.78 percent to $7.30 billion in FY23 from $7.10 billion the year before. Pakistan’s information technology (IT) exports increased 24 percent from $2.59 billion in FY23 to $3.2 billion in FY24, according to data from the State Bank of Pakistan.
Over the next five years, the government wants to export $15 billion worth of IT. With an emphasis on Saudi Arabia, Pakistani IT firms have been making notable progress in the Gulf Cooperation Council nations. In this area, the need for IT services has been steadily increasing.
The permitted retention limit in exporters’ specialized foreign currency accounts has been raised by the State Bank of Pakistan from 35 to 50 percent. The overall number of exports has increased dramatically as a result of this growth, which has encouraged IT exporters to return profits to Pakistan.
IT businesses were encouraged to conduct operations and repatriate their profits due to the stable currency rate. Simultaneously, the import of services rose 16.82 percent to $950.08 million in October from $813.32 million in the same month the previous year. The import of services rose 2.41 percent from July to October to $3.59 billion, compared to $3.51 billion during the same period last year.
In FY24, service imports totaled $10.119 billion, up 17.14 percent over the previous year’s $8.638 billion.Due to a spike in rates, transportation and travel services are mostly to blame for the rise in the import of services.
Between July and October of FY25, the service trade deficit decreased by 9.64 percent to $993.24 million from $1.099 billion during the same period the previous year. Compared to $205.95 million in the same month last year, the trade deficit in services grew by 26.79 percent to $261.13 million in October.
