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Currently, the highest selling phone manufacturer in Pakistan, the Chinese brand Q-mobile, has recently come under harsh scrutiny. The mobile brand that sells Android phones for all price ranges, had come under the limelight after rumors spread of the company’s illegal activities in Pakistan.
As reported earlier, Q-Mobile has come under scrutiny in the last month for smuggling phones and other electronic devices into Pakistan without paying customs duty or any other tax.
The other day, Pakistan Customs officials, along with anti-smuggling body officials, conducted a raid on the Q-Mobile warehouse. The warehouse was located inside a posh housing society, inside a plaza, away from the public’s and authorities’ eyes.
At the crackdown, officials recovered smuggled goods worth Rs. 60 crore. All the goods brought into Pakistan by Q-Mobile were illegal, as no Duty or Customs tax had been paid on any of the recovered stuff. A Customs Preventive Officer told news agency APP that they had recovered at least 40,000 cell phones of Q-Mobile that had been brought into Pakistan illegally.
Prior to the crackdown, a couple of weeks earlier, a container was seized in Karachi which carried illegal non-custom paid devices of Q-Mobile. The people caught during those incidents further revealed details of where illegally brought consignments have been stored, which led to the recovery of these 40,000 cell phones.
Customs officials have already started investigating into the recently recovered illegal stock of the phone company. These new developments have tarnished the company’s name in Pakistan, with competitors taking full advantage of the situation, trying to recapture the market they had previously lost to the China-based company.
