As the condition of the market is improving in Tirupur and other manufacturing hubs in Southern India, many small and medium level garment manufacturers/exporters are planning to add more capacities. Included in this list is T Labs, which is a five years old export unit having just 80 machines and now planning to double its capacity by adding another 80 new machines. Ravi Chandran P, Director of the company is enthusiastic with the local conditions and also improving condition in Europe which is the main market for him. In conversation with Apparel Online he said, “Business is quite good compared to the last few years and existing buyers are giving satisfactory orders. We were very much dependent on job workers as due to the uncertainty of orders we could not install complete in-house capacity. Now after adding the new machines, our dependency will still remain, but it will be just about 20 to 25 per cent.”
The expansion was made necessary, as T Labs is in touch with new buyers and is very hopeful of getting good orders from them. The company, like most others in the region is into knitwear based products and deals in the domestic market also. After the expansion plan is put in place, T Labs is further planning to work on productivity enhancement programmes. “We want to get more production from the existing setup and this is possible only by productivity enhancement exercise. Once our total setup is in place, we will definitely work on it,” concludes Chandran.
