ISLAMABAD-Coordinator to Federal Tax Ombudsman Meher Kashif Younis Sunday said that embracing new technologies and new forms of business was the need of the hour to grasp and explore new development opportunities to propel national economic growth besides boosting exports.
Talking to a delegation of exporters and importers led by Shahid Nazir, CEO Lahore Filter House, he said we must upgrade and transform traditional industries and promote industrial digitisation and foreign trade as a top priority, adding that optimised measures and policy support also needed to ensure for private foreign trade enterprises to continue to gear up national economic growth. He said hit by COVID-induced lockdowns nationwide, many enterprises could only operate at a much lower capacity, with some even forced to close down. Quoting China he said many Chinese private enterprises have now embraced cross-border e-commerce as a means to increase competitiveness and sustain their growth momentum.
Over the past five years, foreign trade through cross-border e-commerce conducted by Chinese small and medium-sized private companies has increased nearly 10 times, he said, adding that it is still growing at a two-digit rate annually. It is vital for the business community of Pakistan to equip with modern technology and tools to compete in global and local markets, especially e-commerce, he said and stressed the need for taking pragmatic initiatives to arrange on-job training and capacity building to enhance professional technical skills of human resource, workforce to meet mounting hovering challenges. He also called for strengthening industry-academia linkage adding that educational institutions need to be focused on the development of students’ technical skills to meet the requirements of market trends.
