BAKU, Azerbaijan, October 12
By Elnur Baghishov – Trend:
A total of 141,000 tons of goods worth $34.3 million were exported from the North Khorasan Province (northeastern Iran) during the first six months of the current Iranian year (March 20-September 21, 2020), Chairman of Industry, Mine and Trade Organization of North Khorasan Province Amin Ghorbani said, Trend reports citing the organization.
Ghorbani noted that the province's exports decreased by 33.7 percent in terms of value and 23.7 percent in terms of volume compared to the same period last Iranian year.
“The goods were mainly exported to Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Iraq, Georgia and Albania,” he added.
The chairman emphasized that one of the main reasons for the decline in exports is the sale of currency earned from exports at the NIMA rate. Due to the reason, a number of exporters have stopped to export. And more than 10 exporters’ commercial cards have been canceled. Because they do not fulfilled their obligation on time to sell part of the export earnings at the NIMA rate.
According to Ghorbani, 2,600 tons of goods worth $22.4 million were imported to North Khorasan Province over 6 months.
"The imports increased by 60 percent in terms of value and 13 percent in terms of volume compared to the same period last Iranian year,” he said.
The Central Bank of Iran (CBI) has created a NIMA system in 2018 for exporters to sell a portion of their export earnings to banks to eliminate the shortage of foreign currency in the country for various reasons (sanctions, economic situation, etc.). In this system, exporters who earned more than 1 million euros from export a year must sell a portion of their export earnings to banks at the NIMA rate. Later, banks used to sell foreign currency to importers for the import of several products at this rate.
The Central Bank of Iran has not imposed the rules on exporters that earned from export less than 1 million euros a year.
Those with total exports of one to three million euros per year are required to offer 50 percent of their received foreign exchange from the government through the NIMA system.
The exporters with annual exports of three to 10 million euros are obliged to offer 70 percent.
Those with exports of above 10 million euros per year must offer 90 percent of the received foreign exchange at NIMA.