TEHRAN - Iran’s non-oil exporters injected $4.8 billion of their revenues into the Forex Management Integrated System, locally known as NIMA, during the first Iranian calendar month of Farvardin (March 21-April 20), according to the Central Bank of Iran (CBI) data.

NIMA, which seeks to boost transparency, creates competitiveness among exchange shops, and promotes a secure environment for traders, is a new chance for importers to supply their required foreign currency without specific problems and for exporters to re-inject their earned foreign currency to the domestic forex market. It was inaugurated to allow exporters of non-oil commodities to sell their foreign currency earnings to importers of consumer products.

As stated by Hamid Zadboum, the head of Iran’s Trade Promotion Organization (TPO), expediting the process of returning non-oil export revenues to the economic cycle through NIMA has been the result of expert policies of the TPO and cooperation among the industry, mining, and trade departments of the provinces as well as chambers of cooperatives and guilds, and many fruitful measures have been taken in this regard.

In late May 2019, the CBI unveiled a directive package that provided the country’s exporters with guidelines about how they should re-inject their foreign currency incomes into the country’s economy.

Based on the new directive, for the petrochemical sector, the exporters should present at least 60 percent of their foreign currency incomes into NIMA, and a maximum of 10 percent could be injected into the financial system in the form of hard currency and the rest could be used for importing necessary goods.

As for other exporters, at least 50 percent of the total earnings should be presented at the NIMA system and a maximum of 20 percent could be distributed in form of hard currency and the rest can be used for imports.

The instructions aimed to lead the export revenues from the non-oil exports back into the country’s economy through NIMA, mandate all the exporters of goods and services to guarantee to bring back to the country the foreign currency amount allocated to them by the government at lower prices than the free market.

EF/MA