RMG export may recover
fully by Oct: BGMEA

Staff Correspondent: A full recovery in garment export may take place by October this year, said Faruque Hassan, president of Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA).
“We are hopeful because majority of the people in the US have already completed the vaccination and the consumers have started going to the retail outlets, which indicates that the economy is rolling on and thus the demand for consumer products, especially for the garment items.”
Similarly, the retailers and brands in the Europe have also started reopening of the stores and consumers started spending, for which the demand for the Bangladeshi made garment items has also been growing, he said.
He spoke at a press briefing at BGMEA’s Gulshan office in Dhaka yesterday.
Receipts from apparel export were up 6.24 per cent year-on-year to $26 billion in the first 10 months of the current fiscal year.
Of the sum, $13.99 billion came from knitwear items and $12 billion from woven.
Here, knitwear shipment registered a 15.34 per cent year-on-year growth while woven export fell 2.71 per cent.
Knitwear export is increasing as people are spending more time indoors, he said.
Because of the pandemic, the demand for woven garment such as formal shirts and trousers has fallen.
Woven exports declined by more than 10 per cent during most of the months in the last one year.
April saw the lowest decline during the period, in an indication that the segment is rebounding thanks to gradual reopening of stores and offices. Currently, the US is the single largest garment exporting destination for Bangladesh, where nearly $6.5 billion worth of garment items are shipped in a year.
Of the total export to the USA, 90 percent include garment items.
In case of the EU, Bangladesh exports more than $21 billion worth of garment items in a year, counting for 63 per cent of the total apparel shipment from the country in a year.