The Hindu : Front Page : Printed fabric exports to Africa hit

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Jul 30, 2005

Front Page

Front Page

Printed fabric exports to Africa hit

M. Soundariya Preetha

Erode textile printers and processing houses search for new market Units had to face competition from North Indian processors and low-cost Chinese exports. Added to this was the high cost of dyes and rise in wages

COIMBATORE: About five large-scale textile processing houses in Erode once accounted for 25 per cent of India's finished fabric exports to Africa.

Heydays over

Faced with competition from North Indian processors and low-cost Chinese exports, developments during the last eight months indicate that their heydays are over and all of them are now on the look out for new markets.

These few large-scale processing houses in Erode, with a total capacity of 40 lakh to 50 lakh metres a month, sourced grey fabric from the powerloom centres, bleached and processed them and printed special designs and exported them to Africa.

For all of them, 90 per cent of their capacity was used for making these printed fabrics.

Specialised printing

"We never had to go looking out for orders," says N. Krishnan, secretary of the South India Textile Processors' Association.

Mr. Krishnan said that this specialised printing was done at a low cost by a number of small-scale and tiny units in North India and the Chinese were also ready to supply printed fabric at a low cost.

He explained that this was mainly because, for them, the cost of dyes and chemicals was about 20 per cent less than that used by the Erode units.

Price cut

Further, for the Erode units, wages were nearly 15 per cent more than that of the North Indian or the Chinese units. Hence, the Erode processors faced a price cut of Rs. 2 to Rs. 2.50 a metre and orders also dwindled.

One of the processors who catered to the African market for the last two decades said that they had not even dreamt that events would take such a turn. A minimum of Rs. 5 crores was needed for each unit to modify and undertake orders for other markets.

Silent suffering

It is thus a silent suffering and a drastic change that is happening in these units in Erode.

But one of them points out that this has made them look at captive consumption and go in for garment making.

A weak link

Processing is one of the weak links for the textile sector in the country and they could use the state-of-art facility for producing value-added products.

"It is time I went in for this change and the change is for the best," the processor said.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Front Page

News Update

Stories in this Section