Meeting sustainable use of both local and foreign products.

• Author: Shaikh, Nazir Ahmed

Byline: Nazir Ahmed Shaikh

Consumption is the process by which goods and services are put together for end user. Consumption is at the end of the line of economic activities that starts with an evaluation of available resources and proceeds through production of goods and services and distribution of goods and services. Pakistani society is becoming a consumer society. The economic development has brought about a revolution in values.

The demand for luxury and branded products cannot be fully satisfied by domestic production. Pakistani consumers are facing copious westernization such as the demand for imported cosmetics, toiletries, electronic items which are perceived as luxury products.

The consumption and usage of electronic goods such as home appliances has increased in Pakistan. However, this increase has not been proportional provincially and demographically. Television viewership has steadily increased in Pakistan. In Punjab the estimated number of television sets is more than the combined (estimated) number of televisions in other provinces. This difference is even starker, for obvious reasons, when we compare the rural and urban population. 89% of rural population nation-wide and almost 100% of the rural house-holds in Balochistan are without televisions. The largest concentration of television sets is in the urban areas of Sindh where more than 50% of the households have reported having televisions.

Though simply numbers are an adequate measure of the inequality that is exhibited by the distribution of this industry; a more descriptive synthesis that can be seen by analyzing the usage of black and white and colored televisions. Such an analysis also caters to the market dynamics of used or older televisions. The province-wise breakdown of the ownership of colored televisions in the urban and rural areas shows that the ratio of color television sets to black and white sets is highest in the urban areas of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and lowest in the rural areas of Sindh and Balochistan, where ownership of color television has not been reported by any of the households.

On a nation-wide basis, Philips, National and Hitachi are the most popular television brands. In the urban markets of the country Toshiba is more popular than Hitachi while Philips enjoys the highest market share in rural as well as urban areas of the country. Given the increase in GDP per capita growth can be expected to continue with the growing industry and the increasing...