The government’s investment promotion plan that will now dovetail into its trade expansion strategy has identified more than 100 companies across 30 countries for outreach through roadshows and conferences.
Under the plan, 106 companies across 30 sectors in 30 countries have been identified for sharper focus and the list would expand further, a senior official said.
For investments, roadshows have been planned in the US, Canada, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Germany, the UK, Sweden, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. Meetings are also being set up with the leaderships of the identified companies to invite them to invest in India.
The new plan takes a different approach to investment promotion than what has been done traditionally. “It seeks to expand the space for Indian exports in world trade by aiming at becoming part of global value chains,” the official said without disclosing the name of the companies.
“World trade is happening in value chains and for that manufacturing is required. The focus of the plan is whatever we make in India should have an export orientation,” a senior official had said earlier.
The investment part of the two-leg plan for making the country a bigger exporter also seeks to engage Indians living abroad.
The pitch for investments would include recent policy initiatives like production-linked incentive scheme for 14 industry sectors, efforts to make doing business simpler through liberal foreign direct investment norms, size of growing local market and progress on reducing cost of doing business through logistics improvement.
The trade part of the plan has identified 12 countries for export push through marketing events. While the trade and investment push plan is looking at the medium term, it also seeks to address the concerns faced on both exports and investment fronts in the last financial year and in the past few months.
The FDI (equity) inflows in India declined 22% on year in the last financial year to $46 billion. The decline in total FDI flows, which also included other capital and reinvested earnings, was 16% to $70.97 billion.
Exports have been in the negative territory for the last five months. In May, the latest month for which data is available, exports contracted by 10.3% on-year to $34.98 billion. The decline led to an increase in trade deficit during the month to a five-month high of $22.12 billion.
In the first two months for the fiscal 2023-24, exports were down 11.41% to $69.72 billion.