India's finance minister Arun Jaitley has urged Indian exporters to produce quality products at competitive prices in the face of slowing demand in international markets and in the context of the continuous decline in the country's exports.
At the closing ceremony of the India International Trade Fair 2015, he said, “One important factor, which our global experience now teaches us is that the world wants to buy good products, it wants to buy cheaper products and therefore you have to think ahead of the others, manufacture products which are cost and quality competitive.”
“This can actually enable you, even in adverse global circumstances, to find bigger markets. And we have to create in India an ecosystem which can actually facilitate that. The purchasing capacity of global buyers is contracting. Their ability to buy has been reduced and therefore suppliers are going to find it difficult,” he added. He said that declining global prices of hydrocarbons, food products and other commodities has adversely impacted the value realised from exports. “Volumes have not declined, values have declined and values have declined from oil to gas, to metal to commodities to food products. It gets reflected in the export figures month after month,” said the finance minister.
