EEPC trade with ASEAN countries grows by 30 PC to 23 billion dollar

Kolkata,Feb 23 (UNI) India's trade with ASEAN countries has recorded an impressive 30 per cent growth to a record 23 billion dollars last year and is poised to cross the 30 billion dollar mark by this year end.

Disclosing this during an interactive session here today on 'Trade Relations and Emerging Opportunities in ASEAN', Chairman of the Engineering Export Promotion Council(EEPC) Rakesh Shah said with a population of 545 million, combined GDP of nearly 800 billion dollars and total trade of almost 850 billion dollars, Association of South East Asian Nations(ASEAN) held exciting commercial opportunities for Indian business community.

This coupled with the economic strength of Australia and New Zealand brings with it new possibilities of economic exchanges between India and ASEAN, Mr Shah emphasised while speaking to UNI later.

Referring to the overall export scenario of Indian engineering goods during the last few years, the EEPC Chairman claimed that it accounted for the largest share of the country's export basket with a little more than 20 per cent share in the country's total volume of export of 100 billion dollars.

Quoting from the latest government figures, Mr Shah said Indo-ASEAN trade accounted for an average eight per cent of India's total international trade since 2002-03. But since then it has been growing by about nine times to reach an unprecedented 21 billion dollars mark by last year.

In terms of engineering exports to ASEAN, he said, it had been doubled from 1.14 billion dollars to over 2.5 billion dollars within a span of three years. However, despite geographical proximity to India's engineering exports to ASEAN were just over one per cent of the total engineering imports done by the ASEAN from outside its member countries, Mr Shah regretted and called for special marketing efforts to increase the volume.

Among others, EEPC Eastern Regional Chairman R P Sehgal, District Manager of Oslo based DNV, EEPC's Norwegian knowledge partner, P Kundu spoke on the occasion and referred to the highest sectoral contribution of Indian exports, particularly to the ASEAN, Australia and SAARC.

They also talked about the necessity for immediate enhancement of engineering exports, particularly to South and South East Asian nations taking advantage of the globalisation.

Incidentally, among the ASEAN members Singapore enjoyed the maximum share of India's exports(52 per cent), followed by Indonesia(13.26 per cent), Malaysia (11.6 per cent) and Thailand(10.3 per cent).

Among the major export items are textile and jute mill machinery, boilers and parts, chemical, food processing machinery and cooling equipment besides machine tools, steel wire, santirary castings, forgings and ferrow alloys.

UNI