It takes three decades for Bangladesh to be among the world’s top three exporters of readymade garments, but the success has come from an industry primarily depending on imported machineries.
The scenario, however, has started changing though slowly, patronised by a new generation of small and medium entrepreneurs who are producing machineries locally to cater to the local garment industry. Many of the entrepreneurs are delivering garment machineries at a competitive price, which are performing better than the imported ones from China and India, industry people claimed. Talked to a number of Bangladeshi machinery manufacturers who attended the 10th Textech, the international textile technology exposition, held recently in Dhaka.
‘In three years, we have delivered 54 Conveyer Driers to different garment printing units and it has been possible only for assuring reliability,’ said Biplob Ahmed, proprietor of the Quality Engineering Associate. Biplob sells a Conveyer Dryer, which is widely used to dry the wet garments after those are printed, between Tk 2.5 lakh and Tk 3 lakh, at least 20 per cheaper than the Chinese dryer. ‘If my machine could not deliver better service than the Chinese one, no one here would buy it,’ said Biplob.
Siddiqur Rahman, proprietor of Kishan Electric and Machineries said their movable and double-sided machine had Taiwanese and Korean components so it works better than the Chinese one. ‘I emphasise on performance of the machines not on price,’ said Siddique, whose company also manufactures thread sucking machine and vacuum screen exposed machines. Shamim Sarwar, director of the Machine Craft, said their compact Fabric Inspection Machine could perform much better than the Chinese one in detecting faults in fabric.
Garment industry insiders estimate that at present procurements of local machineries and accessories might not amount even $50 million but it has the huge potential to grow. The Bangladeshi textile and garment entrepreneurs spend more than a billion dollar annually for sourcing machineries to expand or overhaul the production facilities. China, Japan, Taiwan, India, Germany and Switzerland and Turkey are among the machinery sources for Bangladesh’s garment and textile industry that exports $12 billion plus annually.
Bangladesh Knitwear Manufacturers and Exporters Association president Fazlul Hoque said performance of local machineries had been improving so industry was putting attention on the local machineries. ‘Low cost, growing reliability and always ready for after sales services are attracting garment manufacturers to the local machinery suppliers,’ he said.
Abdur Razzak, president of the Bangladesh Engineering Industries Owners Association said, beside eying garment industry, many light engineering unit owners had long been engaged in replicating industrial machineries. ‘May be it will take some years to make major categories or sophisticated textile and garment machineries locally but the industries for local machineries have been started growing in Bangladesh,’ Razzak said.
