The Federal Board of Revenue (FBR), Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan (SECP), and Ministry of Commerce plan to jointly launch a drive for facilitation of companies expanding their online sales inland and abroad.
Sources from FBR informed ProPakistani that the initiative is driven by the growing need for increasing the volumes of turnovers both for enhancing the GST-covered sales and to help the banking and public finance systems grab larger amounts in foreign exchange.
The tax machinery has already begun notifying rules for monitoring the online sales while the SECP has been beefing up the registration mechanism with extended facilitation to the selling companies. The State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) recently initiated a campaign to facilitate the selling companies by acquiring inputs from the banking system on methods and volumes of credit extension at an ever greater scale.
On the other hand, given these developments, companies like Alibaba have been quick to approach Pakistani companies offering goods for online sales produced to meet international standards. It is pertinent to note that last month, Alibaba held a summit to bring Pakistani sellers onboard to the leading global B2B e-commerce marketplace. The summit was intended to ‘Unlock Business Growth Code’ in Sialkot to bring Pakistani sellers aboard its platform. Pakistani sellers appear to grab this opportunity to access over 200 markets globally.
Representatives of Alibaba, the local trade associations, senior government officials, and a number of successful online sellers are developing a liaison for coming together to assess the enhanced potential of Pakistan to offer cheaper and quality products to the global online buyers via international companies. These developments indicate that Pakistan is expected to witness an annual growth of 28 percent in e-commerce in the next 3 years.
Efforts launched by the FBR, the Commerce Ministry, and the SBP are set to accelerate Pakistani products’ enhanced sales via a global platform.
Source: Pro Pakistani