High Commissioner of Malaysia to India Hidayat Abdul Hamid said on Monday that India and Malaysia needed to work closely in order to deepen bilateral trade relations.

He was addressing an interactive session on 'Doing Business with Malaysia', organised by FICCI and High Commission of Malaysia in New Delhi.

"Our bilateral trade performance has strengthened to US$ 14.3 billion in 2017, marking an increase of over 21.8% from US$ 11.8 billion in  2016. From January to June this year, the two-way trade has reached US$ 7.7 billion," he said.

India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the former Prime Minister of Malaysia Najib Tun Abdul Razak  had set the annual target of trade at US$ 15 billion by 2020. Hence, I believe with the current momentum and performance, this target looks promising. We just need to put more efforts in realizing that, he added.

Talking about investment opportunities available in Malaysia, he said, "Malaysia has many advantages of which India can benefit from.

Malaysia's strength in areas like infrastructure, healthcare, construction industry, palm oil and petroleum products had been part of India economic development agenda for many years. A number of prominent investors from India are already strengthening their foothold in Malaysia and we welcome more investment from India, the envoy said.

"We would like to encourage more importers to source from Malaysia since we have bilateral trade agreement namely Malaysia India Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement (MICECA) and regional trade agreement namely ASEAN India FTA (AIFTA)," he added.