Coimbatore: With festive seaaons nearing, the textile industrialists are worried of the dull sales of ethnic and fashion wear. They lament that only inner wear and athleisure sales are actually picking up, post lockdown.
Despite the imminent festival season, retail markets are yet to pick up pace. Fear prevailing among the people might leave a vacuum in retail sales, this year.
Coimbatore: Post lockdown relaxations and festive seaaons nearing, the textile industrialists opine that sale of only inner wear and athleisure style garments has picked up, whereas ethnic and fashion wear sales shows no progress.
From a street vendor to the largest supply chain giant, everyone have in someway or the other deeply impacted by the ongoing pandemic situation. And, the textile industry in Coimbatore district is no exception. Then industry which is a major contributor to the economy of the country is now grappling in many ways.
Even after announcing a series of relaxations, fear of COVID-19 and lockdown is strongly instilled among the people, who are sceptical of venturing out to buy non-essentials like clothing. Since Diwali and many other festivals are imminent, industrialists here hope that the ethnic and fashion wear sales may pick up in the upcoming days.
According to T.Rajkumar, Confederation of Indian Textile Industry (CITI) Chairman:
As banks play a pivotal role in the overall development, pumping more money through loans will help Industrialists to overcome the crisis and reduce layoffs. Cotton Corporation Of India (CCI) that sells cotton to many Indian Mills has several multinational traders, as customers as well. This should be avoided since those traders are making huge profits. CCI policy should be changed, so that mills get more benefits than the traders.
Govt should relay focus on retail market
Hosiery markets have started showing improvement, but the retail market is still teetering. This year school uniforms sales took a total hit. Therefore, the government should implement special schemes to help retail markets grow. In recent days, the central government is showing more interest in selling more Indian textile products to the neighboring countries such as Vietnam, Bangladesh, Srilanka etc. We have also given our suggestions on this front.
Indian spinning mills have slowly started to bounce back to normalcy. Migrant workers who rushed to their home states at the onset of the pandemic have started coming back to their workplaces. Government should ease transport restriction to further enable more migrant workers, come back.
Government has announced special relief packages to apparels, home textiles and many sectors, we have placed our request to extend such relief packages to yarn and fabrics, too. Cotton prices are also stable and 10% cheaper, when compared to international prices. Yarn prices are also now stable.
Despite the imminent festival season, retail markets are yet to pick up pace. Fear prevailing among the people might leave a vaccum in retail sales, this year. With a month to go for Deepavali, we are hopeful things might change positively.
Expressing his view points, Indian Texpreneurs Federation (ITF) Convenor D.Prabhu said:
The Textile sector in our country is recuperating gradually, every month and is currently operating at nearly 85% capacity utilisation level. Export of yarn, fabric and home textiles has recovered well and apparel exports is also catching up a similar positive trend. The domestic consumption of products like innerwear and athleisure, etc is pretty good and we are expecting the sales of ethnic and fashion wear kind of categories also to pick up in the upcoming festival season.
With shopping malls across the nation reopened and online buying trends picking up pace, a momentum is seen across all product categories.
How Anti-China sentiment has opened a window of business opportunity for India
Due to anti-China sentiments, global buyers of textiles and apparels are looking for alternate sourcing destinations that can offer better stability in the long run. For example, during the first 7 months of this year (2020), US apparel imports were down by 30% due to COVID, while their import of Chinese products were down by 49%. This opened a window of business opportunity for India to position itself as an alternate sourcing destination to the USA and other big consuming markets.
For instance, in the USA, the market size is around Rs.6 lakh crores for apparel alone which is to be noted. In 2019, Chinese share in this market was around 30% and India's share was around 5%. Hence, there is now a big opportunity for Indian textile sector to grab volumes and bigger shares in markets, particularly in the USA. Indian textile sector needs to build competitiveness in manufacturing and also develop more capabilities to make functional apparels that have an MMF base to capitalise the opportunity.
Every $1 billion additional exports can help our country to generate 1.5 lakh new jobs which is very high in comparison to many other sectors.
Considering this, government has also announced our industry, as one of the champion sectors and implemented few structural changes to make it vibrant.
Tamil Nadu, which has a thriving textile manufacturing ecosystem, with sustainability as one of its main pillars, can be the ideal destination for the international brands to source goods.