Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe has indicated the Free Trade Agreement between Sri Lanka and Singapore will be signed this year.

Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said on the weekend that Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe had invited him to visit Sri Lanka later this year, hopefully, to sign the FTA.

“He invited me to visit Sri Lanka - hopefully to sign the FTA!” Lee wrote on his Facebook.

Lee had expressed his hopes in a post stating he had dinner with Sri Lankan counterpart Ranil Wickremesinghe and his wife on Friday night, Channel News Asia reported.

The Sri Lanka Premier had stopped over in Singapore on the way home from his official visit in Australia.

Minister for Trade and Industry S. Iswaran had said last July, when the agreement to start talks was signed, that Sri Lanka offers good potential for Singapore companies looking to tap opportunities in new markets.

He added that several companies here had already expressed their interest in areas such as urban planning, infrastructure planning and development in the tourism sector and also in certain aspects of manufacturing.

Bilateral trade between the two countries was S$2.05 billion in 2015, according to MTI, with local exports totalling S$1.9 billion that year, while Singapore's imports totalled S$146 million.