Tirupur Exporters’ Association (TEA) today urged textile mills to ‘save’ the knitwear garment export sector as cotton yarn price increase by Rs 20 a kg had made it difficult to sustain themselves in a competitive global environment.

“The beleaguered knitwear export sector has been passing through a challenging business environment further to implementation of GST, which led to a continuous decline of knitwear exports month on month basis since October 2017 after completion of three months transition period, TEA president Raja M Shanmugham said in a release.

Stating that the decline in exports for the second half yearly period of 2017-18 was 21 per cent, he said the most worrying factor was that the negative trend in exports growth was continuing in the current fiscal also

The average of knitwear exports in April and May was 34 per cent, he said.

Stating that the sector was now only booking orders and that business has now started to look ahead and was poised to bring back the industry from the brink after a prolonged one year period lull, he said the increase in yarn prices now would derail the industry.

This would lead to not only the sector getting affected, but also having a boomerang effect on textile mills, he said.

The TEA President said he had already met Union Textiles Minister Smriti Irani over the issue, with a request to mandate that Cotton Corporation of India ensure availability of enough quantity with desired quality to protect the interests of farmers, the textile industry and also to generate employment.

The impact of the price increase has made textile mills increase yarn prices which ultimately affect downstream value added sectors like weaving, knitting, garmenting and made ups, particularly value added exporters, as they could not hike the price, fixed more than three to five months back,he said.

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