India’s performance has remained subdued in its strongest apparel export category, T-shirts, to the European Union during the first quarter of 2018.
India noted a fall of 0.45 per cent in volume of T-shirt exports despite the fact that the import for the outfit by the EU grew by 1.46 per cent. Export values of Indian T-shirts too dipped by 3.20 per cent over the first quarter this year.
Talking about the actual figures, besides only percentage-wise growth, India exported 14.90 million kg of T-shirts worth € 248.43 million in January to March ’18 period. However, India earned € 256.63 million in the corresponding period of prior year exporting 14.97 million kg of T-shirts.
The trade data has recently been released by Eurostat and analysed by Apparel Resources.
Even after a fall of unit prices on Y-o-Y basis in Euro, India failed to capitalise on boosting demand from the European buyers. The drop in the exports is clearly a setback for India as T-shirt sector has always been the strongest category as far as exports to the EU are concerned.
On the other hand, India lost its T-shirt orders to Bangladesh which upped in exports in this category by 3.62 per cent volume-wise largely because of being able to provide competitive prices to the buyers.
It’s pertinent to mention here that Bangladesh has strongly been supplying T-shirts (2nd largest export category) to the European market since long, so the trust of buyers is said to be consolidating towards the country supported by its duty-free access to the EU market. On the contrary India, by far, has no FTA with EU which is impacting the country’s apparel exports a lot in recent times.
