This is with reference to the article published in Business Recorder "Global competitiveness of Garment Industry" dated 18th November 2006. First of all I would like to extend my commendation to the writer for writing such a detailed and factual report.
Being involved with the textile industry for more than a decade, marketing home furnishing products to the foreign markets, I can easily say that if the contents of this article are taken seriously by those concerned and if they try and formulate policies and strategies around the recommendations given, it can produce radical results in a very short span of time.
However, being a marketing person, I do feel that the writer has missed the marketing part in his article. We as a nation have never been good at marketing our strengths or turning adversities into opportunities. If you look at the home furnishing industry it had the luxury of being in the hands of the richest and powerful families in the country, right from independence.
Therefore, it developed on more organised footings. Again, totally through private initiative, they also had to rely on the imported machines, as we are handicapped on technology in majority of the fields.
Since those involved here were more organised they marketed this as a strength to the Western buyers with a marketing pitch line emphasising that since Chinese and Indian machines are inferior to European machines which is what we have available in our set-ups. Our quality and reliability of the products is far superior to them, in fact in many cases matching the production standards of the Western countries. The buyers definitely bought this as we definitely get a preference and often only lose business where price is the main factor. This brings us back to the excellent suggestions given by the writer in his article to reduce our costs. We have to work on both avenues to excel.
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