DHAKA, Nov. 26 (Xinhua) -- Bangladesh's imports rose for the third consecutive month in September, although the pace of growth slowed down.
The country's imports increased 8.50 percent to nearly 13 billion U.S. dollars in the first 3 months of the current 2018-19 fiscal year ending June next year, a central bank official said Monday.
The Bangladesh Bank (BB) official who preferred to be unnamed said the settlement of letters of credit (LCs), generally known as actual imports, stood at 12,831.59 million dollars in July-September compared to 11,826.61 million dollars in the same period a year earlier.
Import orders, officially known as fresh opening of import LCs, also increased by 0.35 percent in the first 3 months of the current fiscal year (July 2018-June 2019), he said, quoting provisional BB data.
The overall import orders increased to 14,754.62 million dollars in July-September against 14,703.16 million dollars in the same period of the last fiscal year, the BB data showed.
Bangladesh's actual imports surged 25 percent to 54.46 billion dollars in the last 2017-18 fiscal year (July 2017-June 2018) when China, India, Singapore, Japan and Indonesia were top five import partners of the country.
The BB official said the growth in imports which usually hovers around 20-25 percent slumped to a single digit since the beginning of the fiscal year.
