Affordable Excellence

Nearly a decade back, when China’s copying of European textile technologies was at its height, I met the MD of a German company, which has a big stake in the Chinese market. “How do you tackle this unfair competition?,” was my only question, and the answer was even simpler: “We keep one step ahead when we know they have copied a technology.” Competition in textile technologies has been reaching hotter zones ever. Though China today has been writing some success stories, Europe still rules this technology kingdom. But what about India? We still have been importing textile machinery to the extent of over 65 per cent of our needs. The country’s research efforts are meagre and even the few that have seen the light of the day have not moved from the lab to the production site. Today, globally cost arbitrage is out of sync with the business realities. Even China, which enjoyed big advantages due to the cost factors, is losing the grip on this. What India should aim for at this stage is to produce goods of ‘affordable excellence’, says an expert. The textile industry has the ability, but the attitude, which is changing already in a small way, has to get more steam. One of the new trends in textile machinery production is the increasing use of electronics and development of automation and robotics. India has a long way to go in this respect.

India is the sixth largest exporter of T&A with a global export share of 4.5 per cent accounting for 27 per cent of the total foreign exchange earnings. Despite this growth, India is not the lowest cost producer of textiles and apparel and lacks the benefit of scale of economies especially when compared to China, Bangladesh, Vietnam and Cambodia. One of the reasons may be because India was never an export platform for large global buyers. Rather, the industry is driven by competitive domestic firms consisting of a majority of medium sized, as well as small firms. But things are changing, and India needs to reinvent the wheel of production as competition from newly-emerging countries like Bangladesh and Vietnam are getting more intense.

S Joseph Editor & Associate Publisher