KARACHI: Out of the 25 largest factories operating in Pakistan in 2001, less than seven remain in business today, said an entrepreneur who has been serving Pakistan and Bangladesh’s garment industry with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation services for 15 years.
The industrialist said, “Sadly, my customer list reads more like an obituary. In most cases, the owners were seasoned, hard-working and honourable business leaders, no better or worse than their Bangladeshi counterparts. The latter reached $27.1 billion of garment exports last year, from a lowly $3 billion in 2001. We went down from $3 billion to $1.8 billion. Our failure to stem the tide of militancy emerges as the single most decisive reason.”
Unlike other export industries, this industry thrives on close interactions with western designers. The former creates sketches but lacks manufacturing facilities to convert them into garments. The latter can’t design products that appeal to western sensibilities, but they do command manufacturing resources that can quickly turn paper designs into products – a process called sampling within the industry parlance, usually done for free by the factory.
