Apparel Online India Magazine March 1st Issue 2019 | Page 54

Imranur Rahman, Managing Director, Bando Designs Ltd.
Khosru Chowdhury, Chairman & MD, NIPA Group
Utah Group. Though he accepts that these issues are like
initial hiccups.
On the contrary, Munir Ahmed, Director, M&J Group,
says, “Why would I want to struggle to establish business
in a country where everything is a challenge – from
language to food habits to the way business is conducted.
Working with the Indian retailers is more satisfying and
with retail getting better organised, the issues that were
previously a deterrent, no longer exist.” The company has
already established relations with two Indian retailers
and is upbeat on the potential.
Proximity between both the countries and cultural
similarities are also some of the reasons behind the
growing apparel export. “If any discussion is required,
it is so easy to fly down and sort it out directly. After all
most Bangladeshis are comfortable travelling to India
on regular holidays and even shopping,” claims Imranur
Rahman, MD, Bando Designs, a part of the Sterling
Group of companies. Rahman feels that the Indian retail
market has a lot of opportunity which no exporter, looking
for growth, can ignore.
Some individual experience suggests that there is a
scope of improvement for better business. Laila Group
recently started working with India and currently supplies
40,000 to 50,000 pieces of bottoms (jeans and trousers)
per month to Aditya Birla Group and Arvind Ltd. Bodiuz
Zaman, GM – Admin, HR & Compliance of the company,
says, “Documentation is the area where the Indian
companies need to focus. In case, if anything needs to
change in the document like change in the product or
any small thing, it is difficult to manage. It takes at least
3-4 days to get the change done in the document.” He
further states that if they get the right price, then they will
definitely increase exports to India. The total production
capacity is somewhere around 52,000 pieces per day.
Syed Shafqat Ahmed, MD, Saiham Knit Composite
Ltd., is at present working with the head offices of
Mothercare and H&M. Currently, it exports around one
million pieces of knitted garments per month to India.
Recently, two Indian companies (Raymond and Lifestyle)
also approached him and things are under process. “I feel
that the Indian companies should be little more open in all
aspects; and rather be bureaucratic,” he opines.
Sandeep H Golam, Director – Operations,
Armana Group
Kunal Mehta, VP – Business Development
& Marketing, Being Human
Sharad Venkta, MD, Toonz
54 Apparel Online India | MARCH 1-15, 2019 | www.apparelresources.com
Undoutedly, to get maximum benefit of Bangladesh’s
scalability, the Indian companies have to increase
their order size too. The majority of the existing order
size is average, that is around 5,000 pieces, while the
Bangladeshi companies are used to handling manifold
orders compared to this. Some exporters earlier explored
India but they could not get such buyer, who can fulfil
their MOQ and price. ATM Anayet Ullah, MD, Amex
Knitting & Dyeing Industries Limited, shares that
he was in touch with some Indian companies but those
companies were giving orders of less than 3,000 pieces
per colour per style and it was not meeting his purpose.
“MOQ, price and payment surety are the three areas,
where we want confirmation, and then we will be more
than happy to work with India,” he assures.
Devaluation of Indian rupee is also an issue as it
increases the cost of the Indian brands/retailers and
they can’t increase their MRP. Even Indian wholesalers
working with the unorganised sector face the heat of
the same. And they have seen a negative impact on
their margins, and businesses have not increased as per
their expectation. “When I had started sourcing from
Bangladesh, the rupee was 64 against the dollar and
now it is 71 or even more. This is the only issue I see,
otherwise business is going smooth,” considers Sirajul
of North 24 Parganas. In Kolkata, North 24 Parganas and
Murshidabad, there are hundreds of such wholesalers and
importers which have their set vendors in Bangladesh
and customer base in India. Sahadul Islam is one such
importer who sources 1 lakh pieces per month. He
informs, “Initially this business had good profit margin,
so many people became traders. Even now with the