Explore ideas, evidence and developments across the textile value chain.
91 articles · latest first · 73–91
The Russian government is trying to boost innovation in its textile sector by setting up two tailor-made industrial parks scheduled for opening in 2017, focusing on research and production.
Insight29 May 2015A consultant on the Asia textile and clothing industry has argued that a recent weak performance in Pakistan’s textile export segment should not be a concern for the country’s government, as long as ready-made-garment sales hold up. Indeed, industry expert and partner at Sydney-based Apparel & Textiles Industry (ATI) Group, Paula Rogers, told WTiN that Pakistan has made a strategic oversight by its past focus on textile processing. This, she said, has made the industry ignore its huge potential for exporting finished textile-based goods.
Insight20 May 2015A sustainable garment-making firm in Cambodia has managed to revive the country’s centuries-old, long-forgotten tradition of making clothes out of fibres from Lotus flower stems. Moreover, it has successfully found a growing international market for its unique brand of clothes and fabric.
Insight28 Apr 2015A specialist silk organisation is working to keep alive the traditional process of Cambodian ikat silk dyeing. It involves yarns being tied into segments and dyed separately – using all natural dyes – before hand-weaving these into patterned fabric. The process, said Seila Polham, the founder of Khmer Artisanry, is ‘complicated and time-consuming’ – but it is what sets this traditional segment of textiles in Cambodia apart from machine-produced chemical dyed silk widely available in the market.
Insight25 Feb 2015International demand is growing for Cambodia’s traditional ‘krama’ scarves. Its main focus is Europe – especially Germany and Italy, which are the destination for the bulk of the country’s nearly 50-60,000 annual ‘krama’ exports, Cambodian Craft Corporation executive director Seung Kimyonn told WTiN.com.
An initiative led by Europe-South East Asia trade-promotion group EVAlliance aims to transform Cambodia’s low-value-added, largely subcontract-based and textile-import dependent garment-making business into a sector making high-end goods with locally manufactured textile input.
Kenyan knitwear exporters may be the biggest knitting sector winners from a comprehensive trade deal struck between the European Union (EU) and the East African Community (EAC). It should boost trade between the two regions - including of yarns and knitted or crocheted clothing and fabrics. Trade between the EU and East Africa’s economic hub, Kenya may especially prosper, as its exporters currently pay significant duties on its knitwear exports to Europe, while poorer EAC countries - Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda - do not, under the EU’s ‘everything but arms’ arrangement for the world’s least developed countries.
Cambodia’s “high cost of electricity – the third highest in South East Asia after Singapore and Myanmar – along with low skills are keeping the country away from producing textiles,” the World Bank chief economist for the East Asia and the Pacific region, Sudhir Shetty, told WTiN.
Garment exporting outsourcing centre Cambodia relies on overseas laboratories for the bulk of its textile testing because it lacks local facilities, meaning there is a significant potential to develop such locally-based services, experts have told WTiN.com.
India’s newly launched Knitting Technology Mission (KTM) project is primarily trying to diversify the country’s knitwear exports with a shift away from cotton to manmade fibre based knitted goods. The KTM committee chairman Dr A Sakthivel has hailed the project as a “platform to add value across the supply chain”.
The manufacture of nonwoven surgical gowns are offering Cambodia’s nascent nonwovens sector hope for growth, in one of the world’s toughest garment and fabric export businesses. The problem for smaller emerging market countries such as Cambodia, experts from international nonwovens industry associations told WTiN.com, is that nonwovens economics work best with domestic sales.
A lack of technological knowhow, the difficulty of obtaining good species of cotton seeds, plus poor morale amongst farmers, has brought cotton cultivation in Cambodia to a trickle, a former cotton company executive has told WTiN.com.
Insight6 Dec 2013While small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in Pakistan’s knitwear sector have significant manufacturing capacity, they have yet to harness their full potential, according to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
