Comments
Fall in India’s goods export continued in January — the 14th consecutive month of decline — with shipments dropping 13.60 per cent to $ 21.07 billion from $24.39 billion, as global demand for key products and commodity prices continued to be low.
The decline was spread across sectors such as petroleum products, engineering products, readymade garments, leather products, chemicals, rice and cereals and marine products.
Imports during January fell 11.01 per cent to $28.71 billion, which resulted in the narrowing of trade deficit to $7.63 billion from $7.87 billion in the same month of the previous fiscal. Gold imports increased 85 per cent during the month to $2.91 billion, while petroleum dropped 39 per cent to $5.02 billion because of low global prices.
World economies “The trend of falling exports is in tandem with other major world economies. The growth in exports in November 2015 have fallen 10.51 per cent in the US, 9.48 per cent in the EU and 7.1 per cent in China, over the corresponding period,” an official release from the Commerce Ministry said.
Exporters of engineering goods, the sector which witnessed a decline of 27 per cent in January, do not expect things to improve in the immediate future. “It is not only the drop in commodity prices which has resulted in loss of value in the shipments, the demand in the global markets has also remained subdued. Over-valuation of the rupee, after adjusting against the domestic retail inflation, is also eating into the competitiveness of the Indian exports,” pointed out Engineering Export Promotion Council Chairman TS Bhasin.
Oil prices dip While petroleum exports dropped sharply by 35.18 per cent in January to $1.95 billion (fall in oil prices), non-petroleum exports were valued at $ 19.11 billion which was 10.55 per cent lower than the previous year’s exports.
Total value of exports for the period April-January 2015-16 was $217.67 billion as against $264.322 billion in the same period last fiscal. Total value of imports for the April-January 2015-16 was $324.52 billion as against $383.87 billion in the same period last year, falling 15.46 per cent.
Comments
Comments
Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.
We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of TheHindu Businessline and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.