The growing competency of Chinese export of manufactured goods has yet to be matched by any of the other Bric economies. India, which is the second largest in the group, has still a long way to go in matching China. Even in the case of steel, where India has an advantage because of its surplus iron ore reserves, the performance is lagging. Numbers show that China has more than trebled its global export of the iron & steel markets to 10.9% in the current decade. In comparison, India?s gain was rather limited with its global market share rising just by 0.8 percentage points to 1.7% during the period.
Surprisingly, the only area where India seems to have scored an edge over China is in technology-intensive sectors like automotive products and pharmaceuticals, where large foreign direct investments have helped extend the export markets. Numbers for the 2000-07 period show that the largest gains were made in the automotive products where India?s market share increased by one percentage point to 2.4%. But China is catching up, with its share of the automotive product exports in global markets more than trebling to 1.9% during the period.
In the case of pharmaceuticals, the 1.6% global market share gained by the Chinese in 2007 was marginally higher than the 1.4% share of Indian products. But what is remarkable is that India?s efforts to boost pharmaceutical exports seems to have been more successful than that of China, as Indian market share has inched up a notch faster than that of China in the period since 2000.
But in most other product groups like chemicals, textiles and clothing, where India and China compete in the global markets, the gaps have been growing rather significantly. While the Chinese share of the global chemical exports almost doubled to 4.1% during the 2000-07 period, the Indian gains were far more limited with its market share going up only by 0.4 percentage points to 1.1% during the period.
What is really surprising is that India?s gains in the manufactured goods sector were more evident in the new areas like metals and engineering rather than in the traditional sectors like clothing and textiles. Trends for the 2000-07 period show that the gains made in sectors like clothing and textiles lagged significantly behind products like iron & steel and automobiles. In case of clothing, India?s share in global trade went up by just 0.4 percentage points to 4.4% during the period while in the case of textiles it fell by 0.2 percentage points to 2.8%. This pales in significance with China?s gains in these two product groups where they increased their market share by 13.2 and 15.2 percentage points to 23.5% and 33.4% respectively.
Overall figures for manufacturing exports show that Chinese gains in global markets during the last seven years were 24-fold higher than India. While the Indian market share went up by just 0.3 percentage points to 1%, the Chinese share zoomed up by 7.2 percentage points to 11.9%. The performance of the other Bric countries was unimpressive. In fact the global export market share of Russia and Brazil were only 0.4% and 0.3%, which is less than half of even India. Their competencies seem to be more focussed in agricultural products. Numbers for the period 2000-07 show that Brazil has made the biggest gains by pushing up its global share by 1.5 percentage points to 4.3% of the global market share. Russia follows by gaining 0.7 percentage points pushing up it global share to 2.1%.
?This is the conclusion of a two-part series