Ministry Of Commerce: Bangladesh Competes With Cambodia And Vietnam In The Apparel Market

According to several media reports on March 14, Bangladesh has begun to strengthen the automation of the clothing industry, aiming to resist competition from Cambodia, Vietnam and other countries.

The garment industry accounts for about 11% of Bangladesh's GDP. It is the main driver of the country's economy, employing millions of people and generating billions of dollars in exports. Textile and clothing products account for more than 80% of Bangladesh's exports.

The website "Rest of World", which focuses on how technology affects emerging markets other than western developed countries, quoted representatives of the clothing and textile industry in South Asian countries as saying that intelligent technology has improved productivity and wages, making Bangladesh's top factories more competitive in the world. Shimmy Technologies, an industrial education and technology company dedicated to improving the skills of garment workers, conducted a survey of 20 factories in Dhaka and found that 80% of them planned to purchase semi-automatic machines in the next two years. Ayaz Aziz, General Manager of Shimmy, said to the rest of the world: "If we cannot introduce automation, competitors such as Cambodia and Vietnam will win the market."

According to media reports, each machine can replace one to six workers, and the large factories surveyed are expected to cut jobs by 22%. They added: "This development has also brought labor problems to the country, and many people have begun to lose their jobs."

A number of research and survey results show that the automation of the clothing industry can significantly reduce the manual labor time for repetitive tasks such as cloth cutting, sewing and quality inspection, so as to improve productivity. Automation can also enable workers to focus on more complex operations, improve the overall production speed and efficiency, while minimizing errors and waste, and ultimately produce more clothes per unit time.

With the arrival of automation and the fourth industrial revolution, plus that Cambodia will lose its status as the least developed country (LDC) in 2029, it is expected that Cambodia's textile and clothing industries will experience a large number of unemployment.

(Source: website of Ministry of Commerce)