Govt: TPPA will help increase opportunities, protect car sector

KUALA LUMPUR: The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) will help increase access to more opportunities which will help and protect the automotive and local industries.
Minister of International Trade and Industry, Datuk Seri Mustapa Mohamed (pix), said the government was optimistic of achieving the target, which would, however, depend on competitive pricing and the quality of the local cars.
"Whatever we do, we must be competitive and this will depend on quality and price. If the quality of the vehicle is good and the price is reasonable we can sell the car.
"We cannot force the consumers to buy local cars. We have to convince them of the quality of the car," he said in reply to a supplementary question from Senator Zaitun Mat Amin at the Dewan Negara here today.
Zaitun wanted to know the steps taken by the government to develop the local car industry, especially Proton and Perodua, in line with the National Automotive Policy and which will not be affected by TPPA.
Mustapa said the local car industry was not encouraging as imports were still higher than the exports.
"Currently, I am not very happy because exports of Malaysian products, especially in automotive sector, were still low. Last year, we exported only about RM900 million compared with import of RM12 billion," he said.
He said the same situation existed in the car components sector where only RM4 billion of local parts were exported compared with imports of RM8 billion.
"These statistics showed that the nation's car sector faces a big challenge to compete, which would only be achieved by being competitive via quality and price.
"The TPPA is a multilateral free trade agreement currently being negotiated by Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, US, Vietnam and Japan." – Bernama