LAHORE: Pakistan, despite being the fourth largest cotton producing country in the world, has failed in converting the commodity into value-added products, said Federal Commerce Minister Khurram Dastagir Khan on Saturday.

He was addressing the inaugural ceremony of the 14th International Textile Asia Exhibition 2015 at the Lahore Expo Centre. The exhibition is being organised by the Pakistan Readymade Garments Manufacturers and Exporters Association (Prgmea) and Ecommerce Gateway.

He underlined the need for efforts to increase value-addition in the textile sector. “Pakistan’s textile exports, which include low-valued textile products like cotton, yarn and gray fabric, have dipped but garment sector exports have registered significant growth,” said the minister.

“Pakistan’s exports of readymade garments grew 10.05 per cent to $2.101 billion in 2014-15 from $1.909bn despite internal and external challenges,” the minister said.

He said Pakistan fetched only $1.17bn per million bales whereas Bangladesh received $6bn and India $1.79bn, respectively.

Ecommerce Gateway President Dr Khursheed Nizam said that more than 50,000 trade visitors were expected at the three-day fair.

He further said that 200 stalls out of total 500 stalls were set up by foreign delegates.

The organisers claimed that as many as 350 international brands from around 29 countries were participating in the exhibition.

A visit to the exhibition area showed that majority of the foreign stalls were of Chinese companies while others were from India, Taiwan, Italy and Oman, Japan, Turkey, Germany, South Korea, and Switzerland.

“I have so far received up to 40 corporate customers who have shown their interest in purchasing our power generators. We shall make follow ups of initial business deals to increase our business volume in future,” said Fateh Mehdi, deputy manager sales, of Energy Solutions (Pvt) Limited.

He said his company had already participated in textile related exhibitions in Karachi and abroad.

“Textile is our main potential market and we have a lot of business customers in Bangladesh and India in the Asian region. Now we have come to Pakistan to tap local market for our product,” said Luca Sudati, marketing and product manager of Italian company SIMEM which deals in water treatment plants.

He said the textile industry was a major consumer of their water treatment plants which were equipped with bio-technology and met international standards.

Sudati said 95 per cent visitors to his company’s stall just asked for general information, adding only four business customers expressed serious interest in buying their water treatment plants.

Prgmea Central Chairman Ijaz Khokhar said the exhibition was aimed at focusing the immense buying and selling potential of textile and garment machinery, accessories, raw material supplies, chemicals and allied services under one roof.

He briefed the minister about the precarious position of Punjab’s textile units, saying the value-added textile industry was in a grip of severe crisis since more than a quarter of the total production capacity could not be utilised on account of energy crisis, lack of funds and high production cost.

Published in Dawn, August 30th, 2015

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