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Coats banks on growing garment exports

CEO of the British thread and zip company says a new plant will be set up in Ctg

Refayet Ullah Mirdha
WHEN Coats, an industrial thread and zip making British company, started its operation in Bangladesh in October 1989, the South Asian country's total exports from the garment sector of 320,000 workers were merely $624 million.
The then tiny Coats Bangladesh, a unit of the Coats Plc of Britain, realised the country's potential in garment business.
Bangladesh, now the world's second largest apparel supplier after China, exported garments worth $24.5 billion last fiscal year.
Coats Bangladesh has been strengthening its foothold in the country with the growth of the garment sector.
Coats now has two thread manufacturing companies in Bangladesh—one in Cazipur and the other in Chittagong— where 1,600 workers and experts are employed.
The 250-year-old company has a big warehouse in Dhaka for distributing its products to the factories that supply garment items to global retailers and brands, including Walmart, H&M, M&S, Next and JC Penney.
The company now plans to establish another zip factory in Chittagong.
"We will start production in our new zip plant in the next six months. We can employ another 200 workers at the plant," PaulForman, group chief executive of Coats, said in an interview with The Daily Star at Radisson Hotel in Dhaka on Saturday.
Forman came to Dhaka to celebrate his company's 25th anniversary.
Coats Bangladesh's sales turnover increased threefold to $50 million in the last 10 years, he said.
ft now supplies thread and zips to 2,500 garment factories in the country, Forman said.
The list of Coats' customers includes not only the garment factories, but also the shoe makers, he said. "We also produce surgical thread for our medical
clients."
One in every five garment factories in the world uses Coats' thread, he said, adding that the thread is used in 100 million car airbags a year.
Coats produces enough yarn to knit 70 million scarves a year.
The amount of thread the company makes in three and a half hours is double the distance of the moon from the earth, Forman said.
Around 400 million pairs of shoes are made every year using Coats' thread and one million teabags using Coats' thread are brewed every 10 minutes, he said.
Forman said Coats has opera-
tions in more than 70 countries, employing over 20,000 people in six continents. The firm globally generated revenues worth $1.7 billion in 2013.
His company is the largest supplier of industrial thread in Bangladesh and currently the capacity of the company is two times higher than any of the competitor in the country.
Globally, Coats is the second largest supplier of industrial thread and zip, he said.
Bangladesh's garment sector is going in the right direction, he said.
A lot of international retailers are now coming to Bangladesh
for competitive prices, as China became an expensive sourcing country due to high costs of production fuelled by shortage of workforce and emergence of the business of technological gadgets.
Two important factors—recovery of the western economy and the rising economy of the Asian nations—will play a vital role in the growth of garment business in Bangladesh.
Demand for Bangladeshi garment products from the western countries, including the US and the EU, are growing by the day, as they are coming out of the recession that jolted them between 2007 and 2011, Forman said.
The rise of the Asian economies, including India, Indonesia, China and some East Asian countries, will also boost demand for Bangladeshi garments, he said.
"Hundreds and millions of consumers in those rising Asian nations will be the consumers of Bangladeshi garment items as their income is also increasing."
Bangladesh has improved its workplace safety standards, Forman said, mirroring the observations made by two foreign inspection agencies—the Accord and the Alliance.
More than 98 percent factories are safe in the country, the Accord, a European sponsored inspection agency, said in its report.
The US-sponsored Alliance could only shut one factory after inspecting 587 factories.