India: Georgia’s Fastest Growing Trading Partner

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As uncertain geopolitics continue to shift manufacturing patterns in Asia, Georgia’s trade numbers are starting to reflect India’s rise as an alternative to China.

In the last fiscal year, total trade with India through the Port of Savannah grew by 43,333 twenty-foot equivalent units, or TEUs, to 279,149 containers, an 18 percent increase.

Savannah’s trade with India grew by 14,000 containers more than the next closest port in the U.S., the Georgia Ports Authority said in a news release, citing PIERS data.

That underscored a sustained upward trajectory that is also evident when measuring the value of the goods Georgia trades with India.

In the last five years, container imports from India through Georgia’s ports were up 52 percent; during that same period, India-Georgia trade doubled from about $3 billion to more than $6.2 billion, according to the U.S. Commerce Department.

Last year, imports from India grew by about 30 percent to some $4.8 billion, but the state’s exports have grown even faster, jumping more than 43 percent last year to $1.45 billion.

When it comes to container figures, exports account for about 37 percent of trade with India, making the relationship relatively balanced, according to the ports authority. (Most ports have substantially higher import content than exports, as the U.S. continues to run a significant goods trade deficit with the world.)

“Our growth trajectory with India is extremely strong and we are actively taking steps to increase our presence in the market,” said Griff Lynch, GPA president and CEO, in a news release. “As production shifts to India and as demand in its economy rises, that trade increasingly favors the Port of Savannah’s strategic location over West Coast ports, due to time and cost.”

India’s new consul general to the Southeast U.S. cited such figures in an introductory speech Wednesday to the Georgia Indo-American Chamber of Commerce.

Ramesh Babu Lakshmanan rattled off a litany of sectors, from aerospace and defense to medical devices, agriculture and automotive, where he said the potential for boosting Georgia’s trade with India remains substantial.

While the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has for nearly a decade now promoted his “Make in India” initiative to woo foreign manufacturers, the equation has changed after the COVID-19 pandemic “subjected us to supply chain disruption,” Mr. Lakshmanan said in a response to a question on how India is benefiting from U.S. push to diversify away from China.

“Last week, I went to buy an iPad, and it said, ‘assembled in India,’” Mr. Lakshmanan said, noting that Apple’s longtime assembly partner Foxconn, which operates city-sized factories in China, has put new facilities in India. The country has also seen strong momentum in semiconductors, a strategic priority for both India and the United States.

At the national level, the consul general said, the value of U.S.-India trade should see another major boost in the next few years when Boeing starts delivering some of the 220 aircraft Air India (under new private Tata Group ownership) ordered earlier this year.

Georgia’s export figures in the past have skyrocketed thanks to the delivery of aircraft like Gulfstream business jets and Lockheed Martin C-130 cargo aircraft, both made in the state, to India. Aerospace is the state’s top export product, to the tune of $7.3 billion, according to the Georgia Department of Economic Development’s annual trade report released in February.

In that report, India was by far the fastest growing among Georgia’s top-10 export destinations, landing at No. 6 on the list.

That illustrates how Georgia’s India trade is growing much faster than the national average: In the U.S. overall, trade with India grew 16.6 percent in 2022 to $85.5 billion, Commerce Department figures show. That’s half as fast as Georgia’s 35 percent pace.

In the broader Southeast U.S., Mr. Lakshmanan said more than 150 Indian companies have invested $13.8 billion and employ more than 12,000 people.

Many of them are in information technology, reflecting the fact that the bilateral commercial relationship has long been skewed toward services, a fact that might be beginning to change along with the global trade landscape.