President of Multan Chamber of Commerce & Industry (MCCI) Fareed Mughis Sheikh has stressed on the need to explore new markets to export Pakistani products in order to achieve the target of $30 billions.
"We should explore new buyers in Russia, Central Asian States, Australia, South Africa, Brazil, Indonesia etc instead of depending upon traditional buyers such as United States, China, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates," he proposed here on Sunday.
The MCCI President said that the dependence on limited products and a few countries for exports was one of the major reasons of sluggish and discouraging exports. He said Pakistan's main export partners were: United States with 13.6%) of the total exports, China (11%), United Arab Emirates (8.5%) and Saudi Arabia (8.5 percent). "Our reliance for exports on a few countries is unremarkably high which has forced our exports to remain limited," he argued.
Fareed Mughis Sheikh urged the government to support the export-oriented industry by resolving their problems such as undue delay in refund claims, energy shortage and high input cost. He said that at a time when regional countries were taking big strides towards economic prosperity and gaining the status of global economic players, decline in the country's exports was a matter of grave concern and needed to be resolved within the shortest possible time.
He said that Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Venezuela and Chile were not unknown to Pakistanis due to their sports, geography and culture, but in economic scenario, they carried a very inadequate eminence among us.
"A very few Pakistanis know that the unblemished and strong economies of South America yearn for the attention of Pakistani investors to do business but we could not avail this unique opportunity," he said urging that Pakistan needed to focus on new partners to gain more economic benefits and to give boost to the national exports.