India exported $ 3.8 billion worth of fabric during FY 23-24. This includes Cotton, Synthetic and Cellulosic fibre made fabric.
In comparison, China exported nearly $100 billion worth of fabric and has established itself as the ready-to-cut fabric supplier of the world by catering to the needs of many apparel manufacturing nations.
Across the world, apparel makers used to buy ready to cut fabric and focus only on apparel manufacturing. That is also one way of building resilience and competitiveness.
With strong fundamentals, Indian Textile Industry particularly the Spinning and Weaving sector companies need to focus on this ecosystem to manage the volatility in raw materials and also improve margins. We witnessed a margin expansion for the companies taking effort in this direction.
Indian Textile Industry imported and invested approximately Rs. 26,000 crore in the last 3 years by way of installing automatic weaving and hi-tech knitting machines.
Rs. 16000 Cr worth of auto-looms have been imported into the country in the last 3 financial years.
These machines are imported from China @ Rs. 8200 Cr, Japan @ Rs. 3300 Cr, Belgium @ Rs. 2000 Cr and Italy @ Rs. 900 Cr.
These investments are helping the Indian Textile sector in improving the productivity, quality and ability to produce variety of fabrics at competitive prices.
For the past few months, we are witnessing continuous thrust from the US, European and Japanese buyers to develop alternate sourcing destinations. Also, our companies are receiving new variety of fabric samples in cotton blends with sizeable enquiries.
We believe that China Plus One is a 10 year opportunity for Indian textile sector.
Therefore, the recent surge in investments in Automatic Weaving, Knitting and Processing capabilities will help us to focus on a ready to cut processed fabric ecosystem.
We urge the Centre and State Govts also to design suitable policies to *motivate companies to invest in such infrastructure and also help in reaching the world market.
Modernisation, High quality products, Competitiveness, Product and Market diversification strategies are the best ways to bring much needed growth in exports for the Indian Textile sector; and also create lakhs of new jobs in the economy.
Prabhu Dhamodharan
Convenor
Indian Texpreneurs Federation ( ITF )
Coimbatore