As per the official statistics, country’s RMG export reached US$ 11.61 billion during the mentioned 3 months period, up from US$ 10.27 billion in July- September of FY 2022-23 indicating 13.07% year over year growth.
A category-wise disaggregated analysis shows that during the mentioned 3 months the export of knitwear was US$ 6.76 billion with 19.70% year-over-year growth, while woven garments export was recorded US$ 4.85 billion, with 4.97% growth.
If we analyze the single month (September 2023) data, country’s RMG export grew by 14.46% year-over-year and reached US$ 3.61 billion, which was US$ 3.16 billion in September 2022. However, export in September was around US$ 400 million less than the export in August this year. However the growth in year over year export cannot be judged as a trend since global import by our major markets are declining in the past few months, showing similar downtrend from Bangladesh. I have shared with you EU and USA’s import data for January-July, we just received August data for USA which shows a drastic decline (I will share with you in my next email). I keep on mentioning that the economies in EUROPE and North America are not faring well. Due to higher inflation they are tightening their money supply with higher interest rate, but limiting the spending power of consumers.
However, behind the growth there are certain other forces like – increase in raw material prices, fuel, gas-electricity and other production costs. The increase in production cost is causing inflated price of goods to certain extent. On the other hand, the emerging diversity in product range within the industry and the appreciable progress in higher value addition also leads unit price upsurge. This is in fact a promising sign as we head toward a sunset, so the story of innovation and sophistication led value addition dawns a new era. I think we should focus more on the future possibilities and diversification when we take further expansion plan, because we cannot avoid inflation and cost hike realities (new minimum wage will also cause further challenge) in the longer term. What we can do now is to direct our investment toward future, and I would reiterate 3 crucial words – DIVERSIFICATION, TECHNOLOGY & INNOVATION.
