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Pakistan machinery imports July 2026: $1.31 billion, up 41% in PBS's own table, with electrical machinery up 88% and steel landing at $604 a tonne, 15% cheaper than last year
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#Pakistan machinery imports July 2026#PBS trade statistics#electrical machinery imports#steel import price Pakistan#engineering goods exports#Pakistan trade deficit

Pakistan machinery imports July 2026: $1.31 billion, up 41% in PBS's own table, with electrical machinery up 88% and steel landing at $604 a tonne, 15% cheaper than last year

Amir Khan

$1,310.9 million. That is what Pakistan spent on imported machinery in July 2026, according to the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics' commodity table, posted on 18 August and, as far as I can find, never read aloud by anyone since. It is 41.3% more than July 2025 and 27.2% more than June.

Total imports rose 18.9% in the same month, to $6.94 billion. Machinery rose more than twice as fast. That is the story.

Yesterday's post read China's August release and said the surplus was going abroad. This is the receipt from the other end, in Pakistan's own dollars.

The lines inside the machinery group, ranked by growth on July 2025:

PBS lineJuly 2026Change y/y
Construction & mining machinery$28.4m+158.0%
Electrical machinery & apparatus$549.5m+87.7%
Office machines incl. data processing$109.2m+74.6%
Agricultural machinery$18.2m+25.9%
Telecom (mobile phones $140.4m, −3.6%)$235.1m+22.3%
Other machinery$263.2m+14.0%
Power-generating machinery$60.9m+7.3%
Textile machinery$46.4m−30.9%

Source: PBS, Import_July-2026.xlsx (revised), dollar column.

Electrical machinery is the line to stare at. $549.5 million in one month, from $292.7 million a year earlier and $328.1 million in June: a 67% jump in thirty days. PBS's line does not say what is in it. Motors, switchgear, transformers, inverters, and almost certainly solar inverters and batteries alongside them. I will not attribute it to industry alone. But it is the line a Vesprr customer's own purchases sit in.

Construction and mining machinery, +158%, is a small line growing fast: $28.4 million against $11.0 million. Textile machinery, −31%, is the one machinery line falling. The industry that used to lead Pakistan's capital-goods imports is not buying this year.

Abbtakk News studio frame for the Rupiya Paisa segment on Pakistan's imports and trade deficit
From Pakistan's Imports Rise 19% | Trade Deficit Jumps 26% | Rupiya Paisa | 25 Aug 2026 by Abbtakk News

Then steel. 518,392 tonnes of iron and steel came in during July, 52.4% more than a year earlier, for $313.3 million, 29.1% more. Divide one by the other and the landed price is $604 a tonne against $714 last July. Down 15%. That is my arithmetic on PBS's two columns, and it is the price the 8 September post's $1,205 US hot-rolled coil was never going to reach here.

Scrap went the other way: 408,041 tonnes, +42.6%, at an implied $597 a tonne, up 11%. Melt-shop demand is real.

What the table does not say. It does not say where any of it came from. PBS's commodity release has no origin column, and the country-wise release is a separate file I have not opened. "Chinese machinery imports +41%" is not a sentence this table supports, whatever yesterday's arithmetic suggests.

It also does not say whether July was a level or a crest. PBS's August headline, provisional and posted 3 September, has total imports at $5.68 billion, down 17.7% on July. The August commodity file was not on the PBS trade page at 11:00 this morning. July's arrived fifteen days after its headline, so August's is overdue. When it comes, the machinery line is the number to check.

Dawn News English title frame on Pakistan's export decline in July to May
From Pakistan Exports fall in July-May by DawnNews English

The exports side is a footnote, and a sore one. Engineering goods exported in July, from the matching export file: $41.4 million, up 10.5%. Electric fans, $2.1 million, down 41%. For every dollar of engineering goods Pakistan sold abroad in July it bought $32 of machinery.

The deficit was the headline on Abbtakk's Rupiya Paisa on 25 August, imports up 19% and the gap up 26%, and on Dawn's report of the fiscal year's exports before it. Pakistan TV's fiscal report card led on the current-account surplus. The machinery number was not the headline anywhere. It should have been.

Pakistan TV Digital title frame on the 2025-26 fiscal report card
From Pakistan's 2025-26 fiscal report card: Current account surplus, remittances, IT exports up by Pakistan TV Digital

What a buyer does with it. A 15% cheaper tonne of steel and a 41% larger machinery bill in the same month say one thing: the supplier's price is soft and the importer's rupee is being spent while it is. If you are quoting a fabricated job in Taxila or a switchgear panel in Lahore for Q4 delivery, the steel line in that quote is lower than a year ago and the equipment line is a buyer's market. Push on both.

My prediction, and the reader may hold me to it: when PBS posts the August commodity table, the machinery group will print below July's $1.31 billion, because a $6.9 billion import month became a $5.7 billion one. But electrical machinery will still be above $450 million and more than 50% up on August 2025. July was a crest; the electrical line is a level. If August shows electrical machinery back under $400 million, I was wrong, and the July number was a fiscal-year-start bulge, not a wave.

Dawn News English title frame on Pakistan's trade deficit with regional countries
From Pakistan's Trade Deficit With Regional Countries Widens 41% in 7MFY26 by DawnNews English

Sources