Karachi: Prime Minister’s Adviser on Commerce & Textile, Abdul Razak Dawood revealed that “Pakistan has convinced China to renegotiate Free Trade Agreement (FTA) to bridge the trade gap by enhancing preferential tariff lines for 57 Pakistani products to 313 items”. He was talking to members of Pakistan Hosiery Manufacturers & Exporters Association (PHMA). He informed that a Chinese delegation is expected to visit Pakistan in the month of October. ”a big delegation of Chinese buyers is visiting Pakistan in the first week of October to hold broad based meetings with Pakistani exporters.”
It is expected that this delegation will place huge orders from the exporters. “We have urged Chinese Buyers to place orders rather than signing MoUs and we are expecting huge export orders in these meetings” said Mr. Dawood.
PM Imran Khan will also visit China in November and meet Chinese Prime Minister and discuss matters of mutual interest, economic ties and joint ventures of both governments.
Mr Dawood said that the government is taking all essential steps to support the domestic Industry and as a part of that process the ministry of commerce is working to rationalize duties structures. He said that “We will minimize taxes on import of raw materials and enhance duties on import of finished and luxury goods to facilitate the domestic industry”. Ministry is working on a strategy to discourage export of raw material and encourage export of value added items. The Ministry will also hold the meeting to simplify the DTRE Scheme and make Soft DTRE with improvement in rules and system.
While addressing the meeting he told the industrialists that their main goal should be to earn maximum foreign exchange and to increase exports of the country. He stressed the fact that Pakistan’s textile industry should focus on utilizing domestic cotton and yarn.
National exports rely heavily on the value added textile industry and the government is dedicated to pave way for increasing exports and making the export mechanism efficient.
A number of efforts are underway to reduce the cost of manufacturing and making the value added textile export industry more viable. As a part of these efforts, the government has introduced separate gas tariff for export industry while it also under-consideration to introduce separate tariff for electricity and water”, he mentioned.
Another major step taken by the government will be that the, ministry will recommend the governor State Bank of Pakistan to allow advance payments import facility against irrevocable Letters of Credit (L/C) up to 100 percent of the value of the goods and up to $10,000 per invoice for the import of all eligible items without the requirement of L/C or Bank Guarantee from the supplier abroad.
Menu
