Chairman, Pakistan Apparel Forum, Muhammad Jawed Bilwani on Saturday expressed deep concern over a decline of textile exports in general and of garments in particular and demanded the government to immediately release all pending sales tax refunds, Custom rebate claims, DLTL claims and WHT claims to provide relief to textile exporters so that they could focus on increasing their exports.

Referring to exports statistics for the month of January-2017 released by PBS, Bilwani said that exports of knitwear declined by -3.44 percent, readymade garments declined by -3.60 percent and of all textile products declined by -1.30 percent as compared to January last year.

During seven months from July to January 2016-17, total exports of textile products declined by -1.54 percent over last year. In the year 2010-11 (July to Jan) exports of textile were $7.45 billion while today it stands at $7.34 billion in seven months. In fact today we are standing at a lower position than 2011 in terms of textile exports. The main reason behind all the declining trends in exports is that the exporters are facing tough competition with neighbouring countries due to ever-increasing cost of production on one hand while there is persistent liquidity crunch on the other hand.

The Government has been successful in reducing the electricity and gas loadshedding to a great extent, which are now under control. However, the cost of production is the main factor behind slowdown of exports which led to lower production and closure of a number of exporting industries which has finally resulted in drop of textile exports.

"Therefore, the government should release all long pending refunds of exporters immediately to arrest the persistent decline in textile exports, he added." Commenting on the recently announced export package he said that it is irony that this package was announced a day before Heimtextil kicked off (10-13 January 2017) due to which the foreign buyers immediately demanded more discounts from the exporters of Home Textile (who were granted 6% rebate under this package).

We are unable to understand the objectives behind announcing export package a day before Heimtextil which prompted buyers to ask for more discounts. Unwillingly the exporters had to give approx. 3 percent discounts to keep the valuable buyer while on return they found the prices of yarn increased by 6%. This way the export package failed to provide any relief / benefit to the exporters of Home Textiles.-PR

Copyright Business Recorder, 2017