March 3, 2002	Sunday	Zilhaj 18, 1422

KARACHI, March 2: If Pakistan has to position itself as one of the three global centres for manufacture of textiles, it should go for soft skills with large production facilities. The other emerging probables are China and India.

“It is the soft skills and the intellectual capital that need to be harnessed,” says Syed Naved Husain, Pakistani chief executive of the textile division of Bangladesh’s leading industrial group BEXIMCO.

Admitting that Pakistan has put much heavier capital investment than Bangladesh, he points out that these have to be balanced with investment in human capital.

With limited vision, you are stuck up in production of yarn of 20 count. It goes on from father to son. It is a poor vision and a poor policy, yielding very little value-added and very little margins.

Soft skills and innovation brings value-addition and the cotton worth one dollar when converted into innovative and value-added products can sell at a retail price ranging from 9 DM to 180 DM. The retail price can thus go up 20 times.

Syed Naved Husain told Dawn that it is a global question where you want to go. You have to have a vision, a target and right policies. The government may come and go, it would not make any difference, if right policies are framed and pursued. If the policies are not right, the governmental stability would do little to help.

The country has a big cotton crop and the textiles is the largest segment of industry. It is a cash cow. Pakistan can be one of the big three textile manufacturers. It is doable with a right vision, target and policies.

When exporters visit Europe or the United States, Naved says, they should visit shopping centres and see the range of goods on sale and ask themselves the question why should foreign buyers come to us. They should then find the answer. Production should be geared to meet the needs of foreign buyers.

If Pakistan cannot be one of the three big textile centres of the world, it would be left behind and it would better not to be in the textile business, says Naved Husain.

Having the domestic advantage of a big cotton crop is not enough to help Pakistan compete in the international market. It would be mean focusing on very little addition and very little margins.

In his foreign travels that takes him to various markets, Naved Husain finds that there are 6-7 firms in China and an equal number in India that eye the global market with vision. Pakistan, according to local textile industrialists, also boasts of 6-8 big textile groups that produce entirely for exports and have strong traditional business relationships with foreign buyers.

Some leading textile groups have updated their technologies, enlarged their production facilities and have strengthened their business to prepare for the global competition when quotas and concessional tariffs are dismantled by year 2005. But there is room for further investment in human capital.

Ba