Bangladesh will open an International Trade Center (ITC) to offer easy access of entrepreneurs to a world-famous online database and a web portal as part of an aggressive drive for augmenting country's exports.

The ITC to be set up at the office of the Export Promotion Bureau (EPB) will assist the trade-promotional organizations in formulating market-development strategies, private news agency UNB reported Tuesday.

With a global trade-related online database "TradeMap" and a web portal "Product Map", the center will be launched officially on Thursday.

The TradeMap is an online database on trade flows of goods and services that will provide detailed export and import profiles and trends for over 5,300 products in 224 countries and territories.

It will also furnish the tariff measures being pursued by any government, which is of utmost importance to initiating export- promotional drives.

On the other hand, Product Map is a Website on trade information consisting of 72 web-based portals and 20,000 companies and organizations.

Each of these portals focuses on a particular industry and presents extensive international trade statistics, tools for qualitative and quantitative market analysis, facilities to identify international trade opportunities, tools for networking, facilities to create a presence on the web and link sources of market intelligence, a demand of the present day in international trade.

After the launch of the ITC TradeMap and Product Map, the users in Bangladesh will now be able to join in a growing network of countries like Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Oman, Chile, Kenya, Brazil, The United Arab Emirates, Guatemala and South Africa in using these market tip-off tools.

EPB vice-chairman Mir Shahabuddin Mohammad hoped that with the opening of the ITC, the EPB would be able to provide support services to the private sector in promoting their export trade globally because it will assist them in developing export- marketing plan, promoting regional trade, diversifying export, targeting investments and assessing trade performance.

Source: Xinhua