Achievement of export target seems impossible: PTEA chairman

Commenting over financial crisis of Textile Industry, Chairman Pakistan Textile Exporters Association (PTEA) Ajmal Farooq has said that textile exporters are badly deprived of liquidity as major portion of their working capital has been blocked in refund cycle and under such extreme financial stress, achieving target to increase country's export by 2 to 3 billion by June 2018 appears to be impossible.
He termed Prime Minister's Trade Enhancement Initiatives a right move but apprehended that inadequate funding would result in failure of getting desired results. Giving example, he said that due to short releases of funds, half of the incentives of Textile Policy (2009-14) are still yet to be disbursed. Giving details, he said that claims of Rs 10,300 million are still outstanding against export finance mark-up support, Rs 1500 million against markup rate support, Rs 19,405 million against Technology Up-gradation Fund, Rs 7,431 million are outstanding against Drawback of Taxes & Levies (DLTL). Moreover, a huge amount of claims of incentive schemes under existing textile policy (2014-19) are also unpaid. Terming funds blockage as major cause of continuous drop in exports he said that textile industry is unable to tap its potential in accordance with capacity. Government should speed up the process of paying out billions of rupees outstanding tax refunds to get maximum industrial growth and significant increase in exports, he demanded.
PTEA's Group Leader, Ahmad Kamal was of the view that export industry is the life line of economy and continuous drop in exports would spell an amount of trouble for the economy, especially considering that the trade deficit is continuing to widen. Giving details, he said that country's trade deficit has widened to a record high of US 20.2 billion dollars during the eight months of the ongoing fiscal year with US 5.2 billion dollars higher than the deficit recorded in the comparative period of the previous year.
Vice Chairman PTEA, Muhammad Naeem termed value added textile sector as the backbone of the economy with great potential for earning foreign exchange but around 54 percent of country's exports and 42 percent employment is heading towards disaster because of declining trend in the exports. He urged the government to take stock of the situation and boost the exports of the country by addressing the liquidity issues through immediate payment of stuck up amounts in refund regime.