Perspectives 80 million users, growing at the rate of almost a million a month, according to many telecom professionals, the local industry hasn’t been highlighted as it should be in the mainstream media. Nadeem Safdar, Country Manager Motorola Pakistan, comments, “The kind of growth the sector has experienced in the past 5 years must be shared with the world. I look at the media as a way to get our story out and spread our success story around the globe. The more the local media picks up these kinds of stories, the more it will help to build the image of Pakistan.”
Even if the mainstream media picks up on the telecom stories, there are less than a handful of verifiable resources that allow international audiences to accept the kind of numbers that companies are talking about. From the 80 million users, there are a number of guesstimates at best that place the number of active GSM users somewhere between 35-50 million. And even if traditional media picks up the telecom because the growth is a lot more visible, they’ve left IT behind a ways away.
