Interview

‘Knowing where you stand vis-a-vis your global competitors is important’

Rupa Ganguli, a consultant in textiles and clothing with the International Trade Centre, talks about the need for benchmarking tools in the clothing industry with Reena Mital.

Isn’t it a little late in the day to come out with benchmarking tools for the clothing industry?

Considering that such tools are not too prevalent in the clothing industry, I would say that we are not really late. Moreover, the process of developing the tool had begun two years back, when we began asking important clothing manufacturers and exporters about how competitive they were, where were they headed, and what were they doing to remain in the market place. That’s when we developed a clothing industry tool, which would help the industry players to know their positions vis-a-vis their global competitors, and their ranking with their buyers. The tool was piloted in Cambodia and Lisotho, etc, and was launched in Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Mauritius, Sri Lanka and finally India. We are now looking at launching the tool in El Salvador too.

Why has this sector of the textile industry remained away from such competitive tools?

The clothing units are largely privately owned concerns in India and other countries. Moreover, the sector has developed into an industry only over the last few decades.

A section of the Indian apparel export community believes that such tools would not really be useful at the present moment....

Yes, unfortunately, the response from the Indian apparel sector has not been too encouraging, even as the sample companies that participated in the pilot runs are very satisfied. It is surprising that the industry still believes that it can do without benchmarking tools, when competition is getting tougher, and only the most competitive suppliers will bag the orders. Buyers are no longer restricted by quotas, and will travel anywhere in the world to get the best and most competitively priced goods. In this scenario, knowing where you stand vis-a-vis your global competitors is, we believe, important.

Do you expect response to pick up in the coming months?

The Textiles Committee, the nodal agency for implementing the tool in India, is confident of getting good number of registrations, now that it has started campaigning for registrations. In our meetings with exporters, one of the issues that came up was of confidentiality. I would like to say here that there would be absolute confidentiality maintained during the benchmarking exercise. This is further evident from the questionnaires that we have prepared - we are only asking for relative information, or information in percentages, not absolute data. I do not agree with the industry’s argument that they have no data, all exporters have to participate in the audits of their buyers, where extensive data needs to be maintained.

What about the response from the other countries?

It was excellent. The industry associations came forward to implement the tools in their respective industries. As against this, the response from the clothing industry associations in India that we contacted was lukewarm. We do expect good response from South Asia, and if that actually happens, we have plans of making this an online tool whereby the participants can login using their ID codes, feed in the data, and generate the required reports. We are also launching the tool in South America.