June 10, 2006	Saturday	Jumadi-ul-Awwal 13, 1427

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SIALKOT, June 9: The country’s sport goods manufacturing hub, Sialkot has lost its huge share of soccer-ball exports generated globally by the World Cup, as the orders of millions of balls have been diverted to China and India because of the price factor.

This was disclosed by former Sialkot Chamber of Commerce and Industry president Ghazanfar Ali Shabbir at a meeting of the local exporters at the SCCI on Friday.

He said the Sialkot soccer-ball exporters could not get the expected share of exports for their failure to compete with China, India, Taiwan and Thailand in the international market owing to high cost of production, as the Football World Cup began in Germany.

China, he said, had got the soccer-ball export orders from the foreign buyers who earlier used to contact Sialkot manufacturers. He said the major cause behind the slump was change in production trend from hand-stitched to mechanised. The foreign buyers were preferring to buy the mechanised footballs from China, which cost them cheaper than the Sialkot-made hand-stitched balls.

He said the levy of several direct or indirect taxes by the government on the export sector had further enhanced the cost of production of these footballs from 12 to 15 per cent, dealing a severe blow to the exporters.

According to Shabbir, the recently-announced federal budget would hit the exporters as the soccer-ball exports from Sialkot were declining day by day. He urged the government to announce a special package of incentives for the affected sector.

Meanwhile, the small manufacturers and exporters of soccer-ball have regretted that the Export Promotion Bureau, the International Labour Organisation, the Federation of International Football Association and the World Federation of Sporting Goods Industry have failed to pull the Sialkot’s industry out of the crisis.

These international organisations, they say, had pledged to support the industry financially and technically.

SPORTS MODULE: The FIFA and the ILO launched on Friday an international-standard ‘Sports Module’ to promote physical and mental growth of the children involved in the soccer-ball industry as labourers. The SCCI is collaborating the project.

At the launching ceremony held at the SCCI, ILO district project manager Mian Muhammad Binyamin told journalists that this international-standard new initiative had been launched under the joint ILO-IPEC and FIFA project.

As part of this ceremony, a friendly football match was played at a local ground.