Business Report :
City Group, a leading conglomerate in the country that holds significant sugar market share, wants to export sugar as the international market for the widely used sweetener surges.
Although the Commerce Ministry granted approval for City Group to export refined sugar three years ago, the company could not ship sugar within the timeframe.
Now the local sugar refiner seeks to capitalize on that scope as the conglomerate has applied to extend the previous export deadline till June 30, 2024
Fazlur Rahman, managing director of City Sugar Industries, a subsidiary of City Group, submitted the request to the Commerce Ministry on October 10.
However, a source at the ministry said they were not in favour of exporting sugar at this moment as the local market has been facing a supply shortage, pushing prices up by 58% in just one year.
The Commerce Ministry allowed the group to export 47,300 tonnes of sugar in October 2020.
The tenure of the shipment was until June 2021.
City Group now claims that “export demand for sugar has increased in different countries in Asia, Europe, Africa and the Middle East”, as mentioned in the letter sent to the ministry.
Five private refineries in the country have been selling sugar after refining raw sugar imported from the global market.
Currently, the daily production capacity of the refineries is over 10,000 tonnes.
The annual demand for sugar in Bangladesh is 2-2.2 million tonnes.
Some 2.2-2.4 million tonnes of raw sugar are imported annually.
More or less 50,000 tonnes of refined sugar are imported annually, according to the Bangladesh Trade and Tariff Commission.
Currently, sugar prices are much higher in the retail market, even though the government fixed the maximum retail price of the essential commodity to control the rising trend of the mass-consumed typical sweetener.
The item is at Tk130-Tk 135 per kg in different markets in Dhaka city, according to the daily market price data of the Trading Corporation of Bangladesh.