The sales of mobile phones in Saudi Arabia have reportedly shrunk as a result of crackdown on illegal immigrants staying in the kingdom.
As the kingdom is seeking to address worrying local unemployment rates and reduce reliance on foreign workers, mobile shop owners are apparently having a hard time as sales have shot down.
According to the Gulf News, shopkeepers said that sales dropped by up to 50 percent as expatriates, constituted more than 70 percent of the clients in the country.
A shop owner, Ayoub Mohammad said that contrary to what people tend to think, the number of Saudi clients is limited compared with that of expatriates who regularly brought mobile phones for themselves, their relatives or friends back home.
He said that shops that used to make 19,586 dirham-a-month earlier, but now they barely reach half of it.
Another shop owner, Rami Al Salmi, said that expatriates are worried about being caught after they failed to formalise their stay in the kingdom adding that the reform of the labour market will have positive effects in the medium and long terms, particularly with young Saudi people getting new opportunities.
The report said that expatriates were given a seven-month grace period to regularise their status, a move that allowed hundreds of thousands to leave the country without penalties for breaking the law.