Coronavirus an opportunity for Indian textile industry?

"At the moment, the word coronavirus (COVID-19) is creating more fear than anything else around the world. This is impacting business, especially imports from China. This has led to an improvement in the local market and for the time-being the situation is benefitting India," Satyanarayan Agarwal, president, All India Texturisers' Association, told Fibre2Fashion.

Voicing a similar sentiment, Vikram Jain, director, SBT Textiles Pvt Ltd, said: “Basically, products that are not made in India and are imported from China are going to feel the pinch. But, of course, these are sunshine days for products that we make in India. Fabric, yarn, raw materials, and several accessories are normally imported from China, and the demand for these products is huge. India cannot build up the capacity requirement in just few months. From March onwards, China is likely to start operations, but in the meantime, we have already lost three crucial months. It’s a long time for the industry to recover.”

Talking about trade disruption and preparing for the same, Smarth Bansal, DGM-product management, Colorjet group, said, "At Colorjet, we already have invested towards indigenous manufacturing and contribute in 75 per cent value addition due to in-house capability with CNC, LVDs, laser and other machines, and our dependence on China is becoming negligible. In addition to this, we are also gearing up for export markets where shortages will occur once the existing stocks get depleted.

“A lot of importers have started facing issues with supplies of both machines and spare parts which will ultimately impact the expansion decisions of many textile printing units. However, we will be able to timely deliver our Indian manufactured machines by Colorjet.”

Fibre2Fashion News Desk (WE-DD)