Faisalabad Chamber of Commerce & Industry (FCCI) will ink a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Cross Border E-Commerce Forum to introduce this innovative tool to give a quantum jump to the export especially by SME sector, said Rana Sikandar-e-Azam President FCCI.
During a meeting with a delegation of Economic and Research Institute of the University of Agriculture (UAF) and First Cross Border E-commerce Forum from china, he termed E-commerce as the most powerful and effective tool to generate economic activities throughout the world.
He said that on the pattern of "Amazon.com" of USA, the China has also introduced its own company by the title of "Alibaba" with same objective to deliver commodities to the consumers by placing on line orders. He told that Alibaba has successfully gained a sizeable share from this emerging sector and now it was planning to further expand its scope.
He told that University of Agriculture Faisalabad (UAF) and E commerce Forum had already started negotiations on encouraging cross border E-commerce which will generate new job opportunities for IT trained youth in Pakistan.
He also assured the forum that FCCI will extend full support in maintaining a comprehensive data bank providing basic information and data about the export related laws, duties, tariffs, regulations and procedures etc. He also assured that he will arrange a meeting of FCCI Standing Committees on IT and other related sectors with this cross border e-commerce forum so that a proper result oriented strategy could be evolved.
Continuing Rana Sikandar-e-Azam said that after first China Pakistan free Trade Agreement the trade balance was disturbed and Pakistan has to suffer a lot. However, the anomalies in first CPFTA have been removed and this e-commerce will now help Pakistan to export almost 313 products to china at zero duty.
He also mentioned specific economic situation of Pakistan where quantum of undocumented economy is much more then the documented one. He said that E-commerce will help to regularize this trade through traditional banking system. Thus it would supplement the government's efforts to expand the tax net.
The president was however, skeptical of the recent development that banks have agreed to provide information of account holders to FBR and said that it is actually a breach of trust and will badly affect the business of banking.
He further told that only in Faisalabad 1 lac students are being passed out from different universities every year. "They could be easily absorbed in this business or they could also exploit it as an additional source of income", he added.
The head of cross border E-commerce forum told that first forum was held in Wuhan China last year while second forum has been arranged in UAF. He told that three Pakistani PHD Scholars had participated in China while Alibaba picked another 20 experts to further fine tune this system. He told that Forum has also provided free E-commerce training to selected 35 students of UAF.
The meeting was also attended by Professor Dr. Rizwan, Dr. Habib Aslam Gaba and Engineer Ahmed Hassan. Later Vice President Bilal Waheed offered vote of thanks while President Rana Sikandar-e-Azam presented shields and gifts to the Chinese guests.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2019
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