Staff Reporter
Faisalabad
Faisalabad Chamber of Commerce & Industry (FCCI) will ink a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Cross Border E-Commerce Forum to introduce innovative tool with an aim to take a quantum jump for export especially by SME sector.
This was disclosed by FCCI president Rana Sikandar-e-Azam 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 the 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 said that Alibaba had successfully gained a sizeable share from this emerging sector and now it was planning to further expand its scope.
He said the 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 the FCCI would 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 assured that he would 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 had to suffer a lot. However, the anomalies in first CPFTA have been removed and the e-commerce would 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 would help to regularize this trade hrough 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 100,000 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 said that three Pakistani PHD Scholars had participated in China while Alibaba picked another 20 experts to further fine tune the system. He said that Forum has also provided free E-commerce training to selected 35 students of UAF.
