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From the President’s Desk…..
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My Dear Fellow Exporters,
Exports clocking US$ 155 billion despite rupee havoc, slowing world trade and withdrawal of GSP benefits by many countries, makes an impressive reading. That, however, does not entail that all is rosy about our export industry.
The rupee sent nightmares to exporters during last year. Occasional knee-jerk reactions of the government through measures such increase in duty remission rates, extension of subvention scheme, remission of service tax on few services etc. did help the exporters to stay in the business but at the end of the day only import intensive sectors like gems & jewellery, petroleum products, engineering and chemicals could post high growth totals. Traditional sectors languished with moderate or negative growth.
After the Finance Minister turned a blind eye to the concerns of exporters in the budget, we started looking towards the Foreign Trade Policy for some relief and I am happy to share that our Commerce Minister did consider many of our requests while announcing the Policy.
New initiatives and incentives announced in the Policy will help the exporters regain their competitiveness to some extent. More could have been done, but we understand our limitations as a member of WTO. Nevertheless, at least traditional sectors of exports should have been provided more incentives to prevent any reduction of workforce by export units. And that is perhaps as important as creating new jobs, an objective the Policy seeks to achieve.
Fortunately, the rupee seems to be stabilizing in the current year while currencies of some of our competitors are still appreciating. Slowly, this would restore our competitiveness, albeit on a limited scale since high inflation is leading to high input costs. Even then, I feel we can stride with our competitors in China, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Hong Kong, Russia, Singapore and Thailand. But what I am more worried about is the revised growth forecast for the world trade at 3.7% for 2008. Though our share in global merchandise trade is only 1.25%, any moderation in world trade in contrast to high growth of 7.5%, 9.4% and 6.9% achieved in 2005, 2006 and 2007 respectively, is bound to make our task more challenging.
Yours
sincerely,
Ganesh Kumar Gupta
PRESIDENT
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Dear Readers, We have been trying to keep you regularly abreast with the activities undertaken by FIEO through FIEO NEWS. Attempts are also made to provide information on policy changes, market trends, and various burning issues of the export industry. We are looking for your valuable inputs on how to make FIEO NEWS more reader-friendly. We also look for your views, observations and experiences about the export-industry for publishing in FIEO NEWS. We especially request you to contribute features on export-related issue, which we shall be more than happy to publish in our bulletin with due acknowledgment. Editor FIEO NEWS E-mail: fieo@nda.vsnl.net.in |
