Qatar’s trade volume is expected to grow by 160% in the next 15 years, more than twice as fast as the world average of 73%, mainly due to its growing business deals with Asia, Latin America and other Middle East countries, according to HSBC forecasts.
Although the UK, Brazil, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Indonesia, Turkey, Vietnam and Poland would find increased prominence in Qatar’s trade by 2025, the HSBC Trade Forecast quarterly report revealed that the US could not find a place among the country’s top 10 growing trade corridors.
Energy-rich Qatar, which accounted for 0.25% of the world trade in 2010, was expected to improve its share to 0.42% by 2025, HSBC said.
Future demand for oil was likely to be at least as strong and probably greatly increased, even as uncertainties remained over the longevity of building boom and whether hosting the 2022 World Cup would turn into an opportunity or liability, said the report, which was released in Doha yesterday by Fadi Fattal, head of Commercial Banking, and Farhan H Zaidi, senior manager (Trade and Supply) at HSBC. The global bank has committed to facilitate $750bn of world trade by 2013.
“It is predicted that merchandise trade volumes in 2025 will be $204.20bn from $67bn levels at the end of 2010,” it said, adding Qatar would remain important as a core trading route with Asia and the rest of the Middle East, and especially to Japan, Korea, Singapore, India and the UAE.
Qatar’s expected trade growth in the next 15 years was well above the 84.7% projected rise in Middle East and North Africa’s (Mena’s) trade and 73% in the average world trade.
“Future demand for oil is likely to be at least as strong and probably greatly increased, hence growth forecasts are consistently higher for Qatar than growth forecasts globally,” said the report, which covered 36 individual countries, including Egypt, Qatar, the UAE and Saudi Arabia from the Mena region.
Japan, Korea, Singapore, India and the UAE are now Qatar’s top five trading partners and it was predicted that trade with these countries would grow in volume terms over the next 15 years.
Japan, which represented $18.94bn in value terms in 2010, was expected to be $47.59bn by 2025 and similarly trade with Korea was slated to rise to $29.35bn by 2025 from the current levels of $10.01bn, the report said, adding trade with India was poised to increase to $13.44bn from $4.12bn in 2010.
Highlighting that “trading partners to watch” included Turkey, Vietnam, India and Poland, it said projected annualised growth of petrol exports to Turkey stood at 11.03%, Vietnam 10.85% and India 7.56%.
Pharmaceutical exports to Poland are slated to grow 12.96%.
“It is predicted that between 2010 and 2025, the total percentage growth for these sectors and countries will be: petrol exports to Turkey will increase by 332%, petrol exports to Vietnam will increase by 323%; fuel exports to India will increase by 177% and pharmaceutical exports to Poland will increase by 450%,” the report said.
Observing that exports of oil, fuel and oil-derived products accounted for the majority of Qatar’s trade in 2010, HSBC predicted that the country’s growth in trade would increase to 15.82% over the next 12 months compared to 9.77% in 2010.
“It is expected that Qatar’s share of world trade will increase from 0.25% in 2010 to 0.42% by 2025,” it said, adding this represented an increase in total trade value and an annualised growth of 5.81%.
Finding that Qatar’s core trade corridor was with Asia and other countries in the Middle East as this relationship dominated both imports and exports, HSBC said trade with Japan, Singapore, India, Korea and Indonesia, especially for the export of oil, were set to continue and increase.
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