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Indonesia-India private cooperation to focus on four sectors
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Indonesia-India partnership. (Shutterstock/File)
T
he chambers of commerce of Indonesia and India have agreed to cooperate with a focus on four sectors, namely manufacturing, mining, pharmaceuticals and infrastructure.
The Indonesia Chamber of Commerce and Industry (Kadin) and Confederation Industry of India (CII) held a CEO Forum in Jakarta on Tuesday. The forum was the continuation of an event held in New Delhi in December 2016.
Kadin chairman Rosan Roeslani said on Wednesday that in 2016, the two parties agreed on cooperation in six sectors. However, in 2018, the meeting decided to eliminate two sectors from the list, agriculture and services, to narrow the focus.
"We agreed to focus only on four sectors compared to six sectors in the previous meeting," he said in a statement.
For the mining sector, he said that India was one of the biggest buyers of Indonesian coal and that Indonesia was the second-biggest coal seller to India behind Australia.
According to International Trade Centre data, in 2017 India imported US$4.7 billion worth of coal-based products from Indonesia, an increase of 42.42 percent compared to $3.3 billion in 2016.
"Some Indian mining companies are also interested in investing in Indonesia," Rosan said.
In the pharmaceutical industry, India still imposed 40 percent import tariffs on drugs, reducing the competitiveness of Indonesian-made medicine.
"The only way to avoid high tariffs is to invest [in India] but the problem is how to find the right partner. That is the function of the CEO Forum," he said.
