The fact that Bangladesh has shown phenomenal growth in apparel exports over the past decade has brought the country in the spotlight. According to a recently released World Bank report, Bangladesh’s strength in basic garments will continue to be important in the short and medium-term; however accelerating overall exports will require not only consolidating existing strengths in basic garments but gradually diversifying into higher-value garments as well as other exports.
As capacities rise, the gap in skill is becoming increasingly visible and a high turnover rate is evident because of this group gap. As the main vehicle for training workers, the publicly-funded Technical and Vocational Education and Training program needs to increase its relevance to meet the needs of the garment sector better, more so as Bangladesh moves towards higher value garment exports, it becomes even more important to enforce compliance with international labour standards.
In the meanwhile, the country continues to register growth in its garment exports. In the first quarter of the FY 2012-13 (July-September), earning from woven garment accounted for US $ 2,456.86 million with a growth of 9.95%, but knitwear exports slipped 1.54% to US $ 2.54 billion. During the three-month period, the export of home textiles totalled US $ 198.77 million with a growth of 8.17%. In September, exports of readymade garments were US $ 1 billion in September, compared with US $ 995 million in the same month of 2011. For the three months ended in September, garment exports totaled US $ 4.99 billion, 3.8% more than a year earlier.
Garments accounted for over 87% of Bangladesh’s US $ 6.29 billion in exports in the quarter, up from US $ 6.164 billion a year ago. To increase the country’s overall export earnings, the country is exploring new markets such as Japan, China, India, Russia, Australia, Brazil and South Africa. This has become even more important as the euro-zone crisis continues to slow down business in apparel. Encouragingly, orders are slowly picking up from buyers such as the United States, China and Japan, said Anwar-Ul-Alam Chowdhury, former President of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA), which represents the country’s 4,500 garment factories. However, he said garment exports in the current fiscal year will be less than 10% higher than a year earlier due to the slowdown in global economy.
The Government has set an export target of US $ 28 billion for the fiscal year that began on July 1. In recent years, there’s been a dramatic shift in global garment orders from China to lower-cost Bangladesh, whose garment factories employ around 4 million workers, mostly women.
