As cotton textile exports have declined 7.39% in August 2015 as compared to the corresponding month last year, Indian textile exporters have urged the government to facilitate free trade agreements (FTAs) with major importing countries including the European Union, Australia and Canada to remove trade barriers. Despite having competitive prices, cotton textiles exporters of India are not granted special access like other nations such as Bangladesh, Cambodia, Pakistan, South Korea, Turkey and Vietnam get in major importing nations like the European Union. Also, there has been partiality in import duties charged on Indian textiles in main markets like China and Canada thereby affecting Indian exports. Countries like Bangladesh buy cotton and yarn from India to produce textile and competes with Indian exports in the developed countries. R K Dalmia, Chairman of the Cotton Textiles Export Promotion Council (Texprocil), opined that the constant decline in cotton textiles exports is a matter to worry and needs immediate action from the government. As a result, FTA talks with the EU needs to be expedited so that preferential treatment given to India’s competitors would be withdrawn and cotton textiles of Indian origin be treated at par with other countries. FTA talks with the EU are yet to arrive at a judgement since past five years.
Source : Yarn and fibre
VASTRA 2015, India's single International Textile and Apparel Fair for all types of Apparel and Textiles Industry, to showcase a fusion of the finest and the latest in textile products from fibre to fashion, services and technology. The event is crafted to create business opportunities, aiming at revitalizing existing business ties and forging of new business relations. Over 300 overseas buyers from 56 countries would participate in the international textile and apparel fair VASTRA. The USA, the UK, Japan, Australia, France, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Denmark, Bulgaria, Africa, the UAE, among others, would participate in the three-day exposition, Mrs Veenu Gupta, Principal Secretary, Industries and Marketing Director, RIICO, said today. The event would play a pivotal role in creating a road map of growth for the entire textile and apparel industry of the country.
Over 50 Indian buying houses are expected to participate from Delhi, Maharashtra, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan covering around 250 stalls. Vastra would not only provide a market place for the manufacturers but it would also be an ideal platform for the upcoming fashion designers to interact and showcase their work to the pool of overseas buyers as well as exhibitors. It would also provide global exposure to the traditional textile crafts artisans. The unique feature of this fair is B2B pre-fixed buyer-seller meetings. Rajasthan State Industrial Development and Investment Corporation Ltd. (RIICO) and Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) jointly announce the 4th edition of Vastra 2015 will be held from 28th to 30th September, 2015 at Jaipur Exhibition & Convention Centre, Sitapura Industrial Area, Jaipur, India.
Source : Yarn and Fibre
Minister of State for Finance Jayant Sinha today asked the corporates to refrain from seeking concessions and suggested that they should rather come up with proposals to increase tax revenues. "Very often we see proposals coming in where people say give us this concession, give us a free pass... In a situation where we had a high fiscal deficit, tax to GDP is far below..our debt to GDP is such that we have to exercise fiscal discipline," Sinha said at an event organised by Public Affairs Forum of India (PAFI). He urged the corporates to refrain from seeking such concessions, which benefit a few, and instead come up with proposals which aids the industry as a whole. "My suggestion to you all is, please bring a proposal which is going to increase tax revenues, not decrease tax revenues. Those which are going to decrease tax revenue, that require fiscal concessions are very very difficult for us to accommodate. We need to increase tax revenues," Sinha said. He also suggested to bring forward practical solutions to deal with problems. "If your proposal comes in saying give me a fiscal concession and it is going to cost the government money and really what you are saying is transfer money from people's pocket to my pocket. Those proposals are very very difficult for us to act on," he said. We are in a policy making cauldron. We cannot tackle everything all at once. We have and width issues in terms of execution capacity at the ground level, we have bandwidth issues about what can go through the legislative process, there are bandwidth issues in terms of decision making at the policymaker level... So we have to sequence," he said.
Source : The Financial Express
The Indo-American Chamber of Commerce (IACC) is planning to handhold small and medium enterprises to promote Indo-US business and trade relations. According to Asoke K Laha, President of IACC, the Chamber has for the first time initiated a trade delegation to the US under the ‘Select USA’ programme around March this year. Thirty-four members out of a delegation of 74 went through the IACC. “We intend to facilitate and handhold the SMEs especially with regard to do business in the US. A majority of the delegation was from south India; involving sectors like IT and textiles,” he said during a press conference.
Investment in Bengal
According to Laha, West Bengal needed to push itself further for projecting itself as an attractive option for investors. While damage had been done to the State’s image post Tatas pulling out the small car project; there are already “positive signs.” However, a lot of infrastructure development needs to be made before the State can pitch itself even strongly. “There are some positive signs in the State. But we tend to remember the negatives more,” he said.
Source : Business Lines
India and the US will hold talks in six key areas including infrastructure, services, skill development and standards at the first Indo-US Strategic and Commercial Dialogue in Washington early next week. The India-US CEO forum, headed by Tata Group’s Cyrus Mistry and Honeywell’s David Cote, will meet a day prior to the commercial dialogue and provide its inputs. The dialogue will be co-chaired by External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and Commerce Minister Nirmala Sitharaman from the Indian side and US Secretary of State John Kerry and US Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker from the other side. The US-India CEO forum will meet on September 21 while the Indo-US Strategic and Commercial Dialogue is scheduled on September 22. “A total of six working groups focussing on priority areas of cooperation would meet and identify specific ways to collaborate. All six areas have been selected on the basis of the potential they hold for future growth,” a government official told BusinessLine.
Trade target
The US is one of the largest trading partners of India and the two countries have set a target of increasing bilateral trade five-fold to $500 billion over the next few years.While the India and the US already have a forum called the Trade Policy Forum for interaction between policy makers, it focuses mostly on market access issues, while the commercial dialogue has a wider focus of generating more business through policy change, the official explained. The six working groups cover infrastructure, services, standards, business climate including ease of doing business, innovation, entrepreneurship & skill development and cooperation in technical textiles and guar gum.“In the area of services, the Minister will, once again, raise the pending issue of a totalisation or social security agreement and press on the need to finalise it soon,” the official said.Although the US agreed to start talks on a totalisation agreement with India earlier this year, something that it was avoiding for long, not much progress has happened beyond that. A totalisation agreement can help Indian IT companies operating in the US can save up to $4 billion in annual deposits made into the US social security kitty that their Indian workers could neither use nor get refunded.Infrastructure would be of primary importance as India is trying to woo American investments in the sector. The two countries already have plans of jointly developing smart cities.
Source : Business Lines
From the story about the boy who cried wolf, the most commonly drawn lesson is that one should not raise an alarm about an unpleasant eventuality when it is not imminent. It is equally important to bear in mind that the wolf will eventually come, when you are least prepared for it. The US Fed rate lift-off has been like the wolf in the tale. It has not happened on a few past occasions when it could have. This does not mean that it will not happen, perhaps later this year itself. India would do well to use the respite offered by the Fed’s decision to hold its hand for the time being to prepare for when US policy rates will move up from 0-0.25 per cent. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) cutting its policy rate is just one of those things. The dollar has dropped against most currencies, after the decision to defer a rate hike. The rupee, too, has strengthened, against the dollar. Which means that it has extended its overvaluation against other major currencies, further hurting exports. This is as good a time as any to nudge the rupee lower. One way to do that is to lower the central bank’s policy rate, which would induce some foreign capital reallocation away from India. If much of the volatile capital leaves India before the Fed lifts rates, there would be little room for any violent impact on the markets. Consumer prices are rising again, if you leave aside the year-on-year figure and look at the sequential movement of the index month to month. This might inhibit the RBI from paring rates. Food price inflation in a year of deficient monsoon cannot be the yardstick for setting monetary policy. The government has been adopting supply-side measures to ease the pain and should do more, to ease the upward pressure on food prices. The government has to clean up the act when it comes to de-clogging stalled payments to vendors and construction companies for their work done, for itself or for stateowned enterprises. If that happens, new work orders from the Railways and national highways will take off better, and give momentum to the economy in the short run, before the rate hike does make its appearance. Even three little pigs managed to best the wolf.
Source The Economic Times
India must dramatically expand its trade, improve standards and seriously prepare to enter the two regional trade pacts under negotiation or risk being left behind in the competitive race for markets. China is already positioning itself to enter the Trans Pacific Partnership (TTP), a grouping of 12 countries ranging from the US to Chile to Vietnam and Australia that is expected to set new rules of the game. Beijing has already held 20 negotiating sessions with the US to explore entering the TPP at a later stage. If China along with other key Asian countries joins TPP while India doesn’t, it stands to lose $50 billion in exports. But if India does join at a later stage, it could gain $500 billion per year in expanded exports. TPP members will give preferential treatment to each other, and those outside will obviously lose.
At the other end is the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or TTIP, between Europe and the US. India is in neither. “The bottomline is that India is being left behind in the current competitive liberalisation race and suffering from de facto trade isolation,” according to a new report by the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “India stands at a potentially transformative threshold. It is en route to becoming the world’s third-largest economy. One key element missing, however: a concerted effort to achieve the trade expansion needed to meet the country’s growth and job creation targets,” the report says. The blunt and prescriptive report, written by C Fred Bergsten, director emeritus of the institute, was released on Thursday, on the eve of Indo-United States Strategic and Commercial Dialogue to be held in Washington. For the first time, trade and commerce have been given the same importance as the strategic aspect of bilateral relations. Bergsten, author of 43 books and a member of the President’s Advisory Committee for Trade Policy, has given stark advice, which is unlikely to go down well with New Delhi. But the scenario he has laid out is real because the two trade pacts are moving in a pincer movement around India. Bergsten says that India needs to grow at 8-10 per cent to “employ its rapidly rising population and to eliminate its sizeable pockets of remaining poverty.” The only way is to exponentially expand trade in both goods and services. Even though PM Narendra Modi has laid out a reform agenda, in the end it won’t be enough. No country has grown rapidly without trade expansion. Japan and Korea rose from the ashes of war to become competitive economies in merely 25 years through trade-led growth, Bergsten says. Although the Indian economy has opened considerably over the last 30 years, the share of exports in the economy has “stagnated.” Exports of manufactured goods and services are both stagnant. This is compounded by India’s “absence from the megaregional trade agreements.” As a first step, the report recommends India promptly take up President Barack Obama’s offer to help New Delhi join APEC, or the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, instead of being “curiously passive.” An entry to APEC would send a positive signal all around. Then India should apply to enter TPP when it contemplates expansion. Currently, China is in APEC but not in TPP. As a member of APEC, China could “block Indian accession to APEC itself ” and later to the TPP, Bergsten warns. A race between India and China for TPP could emerge and some countries may object to having both Asian giants in TPP because of the “combined competitive threat.” Among other suggestions by Bergsten is for India to conclude a bilateral investment treaty with the US to indicate it is “open for business.” It could then build on it to get a free trade agreement to give a framework to the bilateral economic relationship, which would double textile exports to the US for one. An FTA could give India access to US natural gas for another. By always saying “No” to everything, India has little leverage when negotiating. It has chosen to stay outside even those agreements where it has a direct interest such as the Trade in Services Agreement. China has applied to join. If India takes big steps on the outside, it may be able to move faster on domestic reforms. Bergsten says many countries, including Japan and China, used external liberalisation to promote and lock in domestic reforms. When China joined the WTO in 2000, former President Jiang Zemin sent his emissaries all across the country and forced local officials to change policies and adhere to international standards. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is using Japan’s membership in TPP to drive structural reforms in the domestic economy – the “third arrow” of his revival strategy. Korea used the same strategy with various FTAs. India itself used the strategy to some extent in the 1990s when it enacted some reforms when GATT rejected its “import quota” arguments it was using on grounds of balance of payment problems.
Source : The Economic Times
The international crude oil price of Indian Basket as computed/published today by Petroleum Planning and Analysis Cell (PPAC) under the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas was US$ 46.29 per barrel (bbl) on 17.09.2015. This was higher than the price of US$ 45.50 per bbl on previous publishing day of 16.09.2015. In rupee terms, the price of Indian Basket increased to Rs 3078.12 per bbl on 17.09.2015 as compared to Rs 3025.69 per bbl on 16.09.2015. Rupee closed at Rs 66.50 per US$ on 16.09.2015. The table below gives details in this regard:
|
Particulars |
Unit |
Price on September 17, 2015 (Previous trading day i.e. 16.09.2015) |
Pricing Fortnight for 16.09.2015 (Aug 28 to Sep 11, 2015) |
|
Crude Oil (Indian Basket) |
($/bbl) |
46.29 (45.50) |
47.42 |
|
(Rs/bbl |
3078.12 (3025.69) |
3147.27 |
|
|
Exchange Rate |
(Rs/$) |
66.50* |
66.37 |
Source : Ministry of Textiles
Hangzhou-based Keer Group became the first Chinese textile maker to set up a subsidiary in the US 7-months ago hoping to help revive the textile industry in a community in the southeastern US state of South Carolina. Its US branch, the Keer America Corporation, is located in Lancaster County, South Carolina. Its establishment has created a new series of job opportunities for people in the community, textile manufacturing had been a backbone industry in Lancaster County for decades. Bob Bundy, Chair of the Lancaster County Council, said that the unemployment number during the height of the depression era or so was up in the mid-teens, like 15 percent or 16 percent, which is very, very high. It's a fundamental thing that people need to be working and producing. The Chinese company's plant produces around 60 tons of yarn every day. Around 20 Chinese executives form the nucleus of the company's leadership. Wang Ke, plant manager, said that setting up a branch in the US not only helps lower their production costs, but also gives them access to the global market. They are very confident in expanding their market. Keer deals with Chinese clients when they are in China. But here in the US, they have brought in an advanced management and manufacturing team, and they are ready to deal with clients from around the world. While the management team may be prepared to deal with the international community, getting the local workforce on-board does have its challenges. Keer America Corporation despite the challenges in the new market plans to expand its production in Lancaster County, which will mean employing more workers in the near future.
Source : Yarn and fibre
South Africa's Minister of Trade and Industry, Dr Rob Davies has said paying workers low wages in the textile sector won't make it more competitive and desirable in advancing manufacturing in the country. The minister was speaking at the Prestige Clothing Factory which is the manufacturing arm of Foschini in Cape Town today. Davies visited Prestige Clothing Factory and Damen Shipyards Group as part of “Taking the dti to the Factories” campaign. The campaign is aimed at offering the political leadership of the department an opportunity to interact with directors of companies which have received funding from Department of Trade and Industry (the dti), in order to assess the impact of the financial support. In a statement, Davies said even though the sector still remains a challenge and export had gone down over the years, the government had put a number of measures in place like (duty credit certificate schemes, tariff reduction, etc).“In order to address these challenges in the sector the dti introduced the Clothing and Textiles Competitiveness Programme which had had a big impact so far including the saving of the 69,000 stable jobs. The programme has also been responsible for the introduction of the vertical cluster through the Competitive Improvement Programme (CIP). The Foschini Group was the first big retailer to embrace the dti CIP concept by forming the first vertical ordinary cluster which was formed and approved in April 2011,” said Davies. Davies added that The Foschini Fast Fashion Cluster was valued at a total cost of Rand 32,791,604 of which Rand 24,593,703 was funded through the CIP whilst 8,197,901 was their contribution and the other comes from the industry itself. “Total funds allocated to the second phase was Rand 32,780,550 of which Rand 8,195,138 is the consortium contribution whilst the CIP contribution is Rand 24,585,412. This has shown that as a retail group, Foschini is currently leading in terms of a vertical cluster that has value chain representation,” he said. (SH)
Source : Fibre2fashion
Cotton is the second major cash crop after sugarcane in Swaziland and the main source of income for small scale famers, especially those in drought prone areas. The cotton industry is currently under performing yet the cotton industry used to be a source of livelihood for 40 000 Swazis. Farmers grow cotton to pay school fees, build houses, buy food and clothes. The decline of cotton prices in world markets has resulted to a price drop locally. Swaziland Cotton Board Chief Executive Officer Daniel Khumalo said that this was one of the numerous challenges faced by the cotton sector. The planting season this year would be October 1. Meanwhile, the Cotton Board has commenced its seasonal training which entailed training of extension personnel from all cotton growing regions in Swaziland. The CEO said that cotton closed season was a period where cotton field were expected to be without any cotton. Farmers would be expected to cut and burn all cotton stover. This is according to Section 10 (1) (a) of the Cotton Act of 1967. It says the date for the whole of Swaziland, or different dates for particular areas thereof, before which all cotton plants shall be destroyed. Khumalo said that the cotton close season was aimed at preventing carryover for disease from season to season, destroying all seasonal pest through breaking the life cycle and eliminating cotton ratoon. He said that such a season also encouraged cultural control for cotton pest and diseases.
Source : Yarn and fibre
The Holding Company for Cotton Spinning and Weaving, a public sector enterprise run by the Government of Egypt, has provided investments worth EGP 150 million (approx $19.15 million) to eight subsidiary companies this year, according to Egyptian media reports. The company is supplying urgent investments to 8 subsidiary companies to boost the production capacity and make the number of production lines, which have been held up for a long time, operational. The holding company will be funding the new investments from its treasury, which will be utilised for buying equipments and machineries over a maximum period of three months. The investments will flow throughout the financial year 2015-14 and the restructuring is expected to take place in around one year. The Egypt based company plans to increase total profits among its subsidiary companies from EGP 3.4 billion ($434 million) in financial year 2014-15 to EGP 4.5 billion throughout 2015-16. The company also hopes to decrease losses by EGP 400 million ($51 million) approximately during this period. The subsidiary companies who will be receiving the investment are EL Nasr for Wool & Selected Textiles; Damietta Spinning and Weaving; Daqhalia Spinning and Weaving; El-Nasr Spinning and Weaving Shourbagui; Stia; Misr Spinning and Weaving Company in Mahalla; El-Nasr Spinning, Weaving, and Dyeing; and Misr Spinning and Weaving in Kafr El Dawar. (HO)
Source : Fibre2fashion
