T

he Indonesian Textile Association (API) has urged local players in the industry to regularly upgrade their production facilities to maintain the competitiveness of the country’s textile and textile products (TPT) in the global market.

API chairman Ade Sudrajat said many textile makers in the country currently still relied on old machinery and were getting more reluctant to invest more in the backdrop of weakening global demand.

To deal with the issue, Ade, for instance, suggested the government facilitate collaboration between local businesses and textile machinery manufacturers in India, deemed as one of leading nations in the industry.

“Indonesia and India can deepen their cooperation, by, for example, providing credit facilities for the purchase of [textile] machinery,” Ade said recently, after attending an event in Bandung to introduce the 10th India International Textile Machinery Exhibition (India ITME-2016),

India currently had at least 1,000 manufacturers of spinning and dyeing machinery, Ade said. There are 45 million workers in the textile industry alone in India, a home to around 1.2 billion people.

Indonesian textile exports have failed to make significant progress over the last five years partly due to declining orders from the country’s main trading partners, including Japan and the US. Data from the Central Statistics Agency (BPS) show that the amount of textile exports remained stagnant at around US$13 billion since 2011.

Another reason to choose India as a trading partner, Ade continued, was because the price of textile machinery was as cheap as China-made ones,

Sanjiy Lathia, chairman of India ITME-2016 shared his optimism that the textile industry in his country would keep growing in line with its government’s policy to stimulate exports.

He explained that India’s government had targeted 10 million new jobs in the industry in order to boost textile exports valued at up to $30 billion within the next five years.

“We exported US$45 billion last year. The export is projected to rise about 6 to 8 percent this year. We have a very large market [in the textile industry],” Sanjiv said.

India ITME-2016 will run from Dec. 3 to 8 at Bombay Convention and Exhibition Centre in Mumbai. The event is set to showcase an extensive range of textile machinery, accessories, components, innovative textile technology with participation from over 1500 exhibitors, making it one of the world’s largest events for the textile sector.

Data from the BPS show that in 2014 alone there was a drop in the level of competitiveness of Indonesian TPT in the world market of 1.3 percent. Vietnam, by contrast, saw its level of competitiveness increase by 1.8 percent year-on-year. Indonesia’s global decline in competitiveness was also present in US and European markets, which saw falls of 25 percent and 3 percent, respectively. (wnd)