The income of Beximco Limited, the principal textile business of imprisoned tycoon Salman F. Rahman, rose from Taka 1,982 crore to Taka 7,336 crore in just two years, suggesting that the company did well in 2021–2022.
That year, Beximco unveiled the first Sukuk bond, an Islamic asset-backed financing instrument, to finance the 200MW Teesta Solar Power project, new textile technology, and a 30MW solar plant.
Analysts now think that Salman successfully attracted Sukuk investors with his aggressive marketing of Beximco’s stellar performance and stock rise.
Beximco started to deteriorate even before the Hasina government fell, following Salman’s successful Sukuk fundraising of Taka 3,000 crore at the end of 2021. Sales and profitability for the company also declined.
After exhibiting a mild decline in FY ’23, Beximco reported a 63 per cent decline in sales and a 90 per cent decline in profits in the first nine months of FY ’24.
Beximco Limited’s MD, Osman Kaiser Chowdhury, told the local media that the corporation does not manage the garment division, which exports ready-made items, but rather owns the textile division. The Textile Division’s exports are assumed to be exported.
He added that Bangladesh was exporting a lot of clothes during the pandemic and that the economic crisis brought on by the war in Ukraine—which followed the pandemic’s effects on foreign consumers—combined to force Beximco’s business back into the black. The future of the apparel-making backward linkage industry, he said, depends on export performance.
When Bangladesh claimed a 2.8 per cent increase in garment exports in the first nine months of FY ’24—a statistic later shown by the Export Promotion Bureau to have been exaggerated—it is expected that there may have been a minor fall year over year.
