Team Blitz India
NEW DELHI: Slowdown in the US and Europe markets is taking its toll back home with export orders drying up for companies.
Apparel exporters in Tiruppur and Noida, two major hubs for textile exports, have decided to shut their manufacturing units for 10-15 days every month to reduce operational costs. This has been necessitated due to shortage of overseas orders, according to executives.
Expecting things to turn around soon, the companies have not decided to lay off any workers yet.
About 80 per cent units in Noida have a month’s orders in hand, while in Tiruppur, orders have fallen 40-50 per cent compared to the previous year. Tiruppur’s exporters said global brands have not placed any major orders for this year’s Christmas season.
“We are now waiting for spring-summer orders for next year which are placed in September,” said Raja Shanmugam, owner of knitwear firm Warsaw International. Tiruppur cluster is Asia’s largest textiles export hub, which accounts for more than half of India’s knitwear exports. There are 30,000 units in the Tiruppur cluster, including ancillary units.
As per provisional figures, knitwear exports from Tiruppur increased 2.5 per cent year-on-year to ₹34,350 crore in 2022-23. The growth rate was not only lower than the historical trend, except during the pandemic, but also lower than the country’s overall knitwear export growth of 3.76 per cent.
In the Noida apparel export cluster, “only the big units have good orders in hand but the medium and smaller units are working at 30-40 per cent capacity,” said Lalit Thukral, president of Noida Apparel Export Cluster, which houses 3,000 units and exports readymade garments worth ₹30,000 crore.
