COLOMBO, Jan 30: Sri Lanka, one of the world’s top exporters of tea, sold a record 308 million kilos (677 million pounds) of the commodity to overseas buyers last year, a brokering house said Monday. The tea exports in 2005 were 2.83 per cent higher than in 2004, maintaining a small but steady increase seen in the past three years.

Sri Lanka earned 814 million dollars from tea exports last year, up from $741 million in 2004, the report said. Tea is Sri Lanka’s largest single foreign exchange earner after remittances from its nationals employed abroad.

For the third year in succession Sri Lanka shipped a record volume of tea, the report said noting that the island had imported 10 million kilos of tea for blending and re-exporting.

Sri Lanka has been competing fiercely with Kenya in tea exports, but the official Kenyan tea board reported exports of 349m kilos (767m pounds) last year to lay claim to the number one place in the world tea market.—AFP