HA NOI: Vietnamese President Truong Tan Sang and his Bangladeshi counterpart Abdul Hamid said they will seek to boost trade between the two countries by 25 per cent by the end of next year from 2014.
The two leaders said they would target $1 billion in bilateral trade in 2016. Trade grew to more than $800 million last year, up 40 per cent from the year before.
President Abdul Hamid, who is in Viet Nam for the first time as Bangladesh’s president, is on an official state visit from August 9-13.
President Sang and President Hamid said they agreed on more exchanges of high-level visits, delegations, and people between Viet Nam and Bangladesh in the future.
Both sides also shared economic development experience, notably in agriculture and personnel training, and discussed regional and global issues of shared concern.
The two sides consented to further expand co-operation in such sectors as garments and textiles, mining, energy, chemicals, mechanical engineering, manufacturing, consumer goods, food processing, iron and steel production, construction and telecommunications.
The two leaders underlined the need to maintain good cooperative relations and offer each other support at regional and international forums, especially the United Nations, the Non-Aligned Movement, South-South co-operation, the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF),the Asia- Europe Meeting (ASEM), and regional and sub-regional cooperation.
Viet Nam acknowledged the proposal in favour of Bangladesh becoming a dialogue partner of ASEAN and encouraged Bangla-desh to spur specific and efficient cooperation with the regional grouping.
