Besides marking the participation of over 500 foreign delegates, the three-day 18th International Textile Asia Exhibition, organized jointly by PRGMEA and Ecommerce Gateway, signed MoUs of worth $375 million for investment in Pakistan through joint ventures with local companies.
Addressing the MoU signing ceremony, Pakistan Readymade Garments Manufacturers & Exporters Association central chairman Ijaz Khokhar said that Chinese companies from different cities and provinces like Shanghai, Guangzhou, Jiangsu, Sujian and Shandong have shown their interest to relocate their textile, garment and accessories production units in Punjab, having investment of at least $25m for each unit.
Ijaz Khokhar said that the foreign companies also committed to transfer their technologies, besides buying back Pakistani products after value-addition here, leading to enhance local export and lowering Pakistan trade deficit with China. "We will make JVs with local companies from Gujranwala, Lahore, Sialkot and Faisalabad, providing training to the engineers from these cities of manufacturing spare parts of sewing and textile machineries and buy back them to export to China," said PRGMEA chairman, quoting Chinese companies.
He said that the Pakistan Readymade Garments Manufacturers & Exporters Association and Ecommerce Gateway Pakistan have also signed the agreement to continue to jointly conduct this mega textile event in future on annual basis. PRGMEA chairman announced this at the concluding ceremony of the exhibition on the last day of the Textile Asia Exhibition here on Monday. He said that around 52,000 trade visitors registered their presence in the textile fair in three days.
PRGMEA vice chairman Jawwad Ch, on this occasion, said that machinery and equipments displayed at the exhibition were of immense utility to manufacturers producing value added products for increasing volume of exports. He hoped that local businessmen would benefit from this technology by adding value to their products. He said that Textile Asia Expo also featured businessmen to businessmen (B2B) meetings, a lot of important industry-related presentations and seminars on textile sector.
Jawwad Ch observed that the local textile sector's whole chain was also invited to attend this country's largest textile show. The exhibiting countries included Austria, China, Czech Republic, France, Germany, India, Italy, Korea, Taiwan, Turkey, UK, USA etc.
Dr Khurshid Nizam, the CEO of Ecommerce Gateway Pakistan, said that this textile machinery fair in Pakistan would increase productivity, resulting into better competitiveness. The exhibition, he said, is aimed at focusing the Punjab potential of textile and garment machinery, accessories, raw material supplies, chemicals and allied services under one roof, as around 80 percent of textile industry is located in this province. The exhibition also provided an effective platform for joint ventures and collaborations to the textile sector's SMEs.