Imports Rise on Demand for Pakistani Textiles
November 5, 2009 Bloomberg
Farhan Sharif
Pakistan, the world’s fourth-largest producer of cotton, may import as many as two million bales of the fiber this year as a global economic revival improves demand for the nation’s textile products.
Pakistan’s overseas shipments of textiles may rise to as much as $13 billion in the year ending June 30, from $10 billion a year earlier, Anwar Tata, chairman of the All-Pakistan Textile Mills Association, which has 4,000 members, said in an interview in Karachi today.
Pakistan’s textile industry, which accounts for two-thirds of the nation’s exports, has struggled to revive growth amid a global slowdown in demand, chronic power shortages and rising interest rates. The nation’s cotton crop output is estimated at 12 million bales this season, according to the farm ministry, little changed from 12.1 million bales a year earlier.
The industry’s profits fell 57 percent in the year ended June 30, according to an Oct. 14 report by JS Global Capital Ltd. in Karachi. Textile makers imported 3 million bales last year, Tata said.
As much as 30 percent of the cotton used by spinning mills is imported and almost 80 percent of Pakistan’s cotton yarn is exported to China, Tata said.
At least 100 textile spinning mills closed in the past two years and one million people lost their jobs. One third of Pakistan’s workers are employed by the textile industry.
Pakistan’s major textile exports are knitwear, bed linen, cotton cloth and cotton yarn and the U.S. and Europe are its major buyers.
Textile exports fell 11 percent to $2.44 billion in the first three months of the fiscal year, according to the Federal Bureau of Statistics. The government plans to increase textile exports to $25 billion by 2014, it said in its first textile policy in August.
(Story found in original format here.)
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