The Other Textile Tiger
TIRUPUR, India -- Every morning before work, Venkata Subramanian gathers 150 employees of Astro Apparels India for an unusual prayer outside his small T-shirt factory in this scruffy textile town in southern India.
"We vow to manufacture garments with high value and low cost, and meet our delivery," the workers declare in solemn monotone. "Let us face the challenge of globalization and win the world market."
The invocation is timely. With a quota system that for 30 years restricted textile exports from poor nations to rich ones ending on Jan. 1, India is poised to join China as a global textile powerhouse, on a somewhat smaller scale to be sure, but still big enough to threaten manufacturers in the U.S. and smaller producing countries.
While the World Trade Organization estimates that China-made products could account for half of all U.S. textile and clothing imports once quotas disappear -- up from 17% last year -- the trade agency says India could nearly quadruple its share of the U.S. market to 15% from 4% in 2002.
And Indian manufacturers want more. By 2010, the Indian government hopes to boost the value of its textile exports more than fourfold to $50 billion as investors plow money into new textile parks to modernize and expand an industry that already employs 35 million people. "The potential is huge," says A. V. Naik of the Confederation of Indian Industry.
All this activity is likely to reinforce fears of job losses in the U.S. and smaller textile-producing nations like Sri Lanka and Cambodia as competition causes price wars and bankruptcies.
The U.S. textile industry claims it could as many as 250,000 jobs, mostly to China and India, without protection. But there isn't much sympathy for American workers in the Indian business community, which believes the U.S. protected its textile industry for too long. "If somewhere there is gain, then elsewhere there has to be pain," says S. P. Oswal, chairman of the Vardhman Group, one of India's biggest yarn producers.
India's big manufacturers are already cranking up expansions. Welspun India Ltd., one of the world's largest producers of terry towel products, is building a $220 million factory in the western state of Gujarat. Arvind Mills Ltd., Asia's largest producer of denim and a supplier to J.C. Penney Co. and Levi Strauss & Co., is setting up new plants in Bangalore and the western city of Ahmedabad. "Everyone is very bullish about India's prospects," says Welspun's chairman, Akhil Jindal .
China's announcement last week that it will impose duties on some of its clothing exports has raised Indian hopes of grabbing even more global market share before China's huge and superefficient factories are unleashed. (See related article.)
"It's better for us," says Mr. Subramanian, the 42-year-old owner of Astro Apparels, which exports T-shirts to American brands like Fubu. "We now have the time to adjust."
Indeed, despite Indian executives' upbeat tone, the country's textile industry still faces some formidable problems. Among them: low productivity and the lack of modern infrastructure, sufficient production capacity and new technology to compete with China's industrial muscle in an unfettered trading environment.
Although India's textile industry is one of the country's oldest and biggest, contributing 6% of gross domestic product, it is made up of many small-scale businesses that compare unfavorably with China's increasingly integrated megafactories. The Confederation of Indian Industry says China has three times as many large textile companies -- those with annual revenue of more than $100 million -- as India does.
Indian industry, analysts say, suffers from bad roads and a tangle of red tape that can tie up outbound shipments for days at its ports. "The turnaround time for ships is simply far too long," says Arjuna Mahendran, chief economist and strategist for Asia at Credit Suisse in Singapore.
Some of the problems are evident in Tirupur, India's longtime export hub for knitted garments such as T-shirts, where tiny shops crammed with 50-year-old sewing machines overlook the town's potholed streets.
Astro Apparels' Mr. Subramanian grumbles about what he sees as India's biggest hurdle: low productivity that negates the advantage of Indian labor costs that are 15% lower than those in China.
That was hammered home on a visit Mr. Subramanian made to China in October. He was amazed at how hard the Chinese worked, barely looking up when he entered textile factories. When he tried to monitor the productivity of his own employees, they protested and some didn't turn up for work the next day. Recently, he says he had trouble convincing his workers to slightly alter their working hours to handle an order from Sara Lee Corp., even though they would earn an extra 11,000 rupees, or about $250, a year.
The problem, says Krishna Raj, who owns another small factory at Tirupur, is rigid labor laws and strong unions that make it difficult to enforce attendance or dismiss inefficient workers.
Still, India's textile industry is changing. Just outside Tirupur is Netaji Apparel Park, a massive expanse of 60 concrete factories costing 2.5 billion rupees and scheduled for completion next month. The complex will be the first of several planned parks to come into operation, and marks India's first attempt to match China's industrial scale.
The park will overcome regular power outages, a longtime industry headache, with a two-megawatt power plant onsite. Treated water, a scarce commodity in the region, will be pumped direct to the factories. "It will be one of the best parks in the world," says A. Sakthivel, president of the Tirupur Exporters Association.
A.G. Mani, chief executive of S.F.G. Exports Ltd., which specializes in embroidered products, says he has 20 new prospective customers in Europe and the U.S. for his small company. "We're sitting here with very high hopes," he says. "China can't get everything -- the importing countries won't accept that, so we have a gap in which to enter."
But to compete in the long term, India needs more companies like S. P. Apparels Ltd., one of Tirupur's biggest producers. With its manicured lawns, the plant resembles a Spanish hacienda, but S. P.'s ultramodern factory is all business.
Automated production lines shift fabric around the shop floor to be stitched and folded by women workers, whose productivity is monitored in real time on a computer at a nearby office.
Flush with new orders from J.C. Penney, Target Corp. and Gap Inc., S. P. is building a large new factory in a cornfield behind its current property that will perform all tasks from cutting fabric to packing.
"Now [that trade] is free it's a great opportunity for us to enter the U.S. market," says S.P. office manager J. Stanley Jothira, as he passes a pile of T-shirts bound for British retailer Tesco PLC. "The new factory will be on par with Chinese facilities. We'll be able to handle the kind of volumes the Chinese are handling."
另一只纺织业猛虎正在惊醒
印度正在迎头赶上，在全球纺织品市场对中国的领先地位发起挑战。
在印度南部一个纺织业为主的小城镇，Astro Apparels India的150名员工每天早上都会聚在一起，做一番特殊的祈祷：“我们发誓，要生产出低成本高价值的纺织品，要满足发货要求。让我们面对全球化的挑战，赢得世界市场。”
这番祈祷可谓及时。从明年1月1日开始，盛行30年左右、限制穷国往富国出口纺织品的配额制度就要划上句号了。世界贸易组织(World Trade Organization, 简称WTO)估计，一旦配额取消，中国销往美国的纺织品和服装就会占据美国市场的半壁江山，而去年还只有17%。WTO还预计，印度占美国纺织品市场的比例将从2002年的区区4%激增近3倍，至15%。
印度纺织品生产商想要的更多。印度政府计划，截至2010年，纺织品出口总额增长逾三倍，至500亿美元。印度纺织业目前从业人员约有3,500万，正在吸引源源不断的资金，走向现代化，并寻求进一步扩张。
印度大型纺织品生产企业已经开始扩大业务。全球大型毛巾生产商Welspun India Ltd.正在印度西部的古吉拉特邦兴建一座投资2.2亿美元的工厂。亚洲的大型粗斜纹布生产商、J.C. Penney Co.和Levi Strauss & Co.的供应商Arvind Mills Ltd.也在班加洛尔和西部城市Ahmedabad新建工厂。Welspun董事长Akhil Jindal说，“每个人都对印度的未来满怀憧憬。”
中国上周宣布将对部分出口服装加征出口税，给印度纺织业提供了更多机会，他们有望在中国大型高效生产商进入全球市场前抢占更多市场份额。
Astro Apparels的厂主、现年42岁的Venkata Subramanian说，“这对我们有利，现在我们有时间进行调整了。”他的工厂主要为Fubu等美国品牌生产T恤衫。
实际上，尽管印度纺织企业高层管理人员语调乐观，但全行业仍然面临许多难题。要想与中国在开放的全球市场上展开竞争，印度还面临诸如生产率偏低、现代化基础设施不足、生产能力不足、以及科技落后等问题。
虽然纺织业是印度最古老、规模最大的行业，占国内生产总值的6%，但仍然以小型企业为主。与之相比，中国的纺织企业正在逐步走向超大型综合企业。印度产业联盟(Confederation of Indian Industry)称，中国年收入1亿美元以上的纺织企业数量是印度的三倍。
分析师认为，印度纺织业的难题在于道路运输条件低下，诸多出口限制往往会迫使出口商品在港口停留数天。
在印度历史悠久的针织品出口城市Tirupur，这些问题看得更清楚。崎岖不平的街道两旁遍布面积狭小的店铺，用著寿命已经超过50年的陈旧机械生产。
Astro Apparels的Subramanian认为，印度纺织业最大的障碍是低生产率。这将印度比中国还低15%的劳动力成本优势抵消殆尽。
Subramanian今年10月份访问中国，中国纺织工人的勤劳专注给他留下了深刻印象。他走进纺织厂参观时，工人们几乎没人抬头去看他。而他在督促自己的员工提高生产率时，员工常常会抱怨反抗，有的第二天就不来上班了。最近，他接到Sara Lee Corp.的一批订单，想通过支付每年11,000卢比，约每年250美元的额外工资来促使员工微幅调整工作时间，却遇到很多难题。
不过，印度纺织业也在改变。Tirupur郊外就是Netaji纺织工业园，落座著60幢水泥结构的工厂，耗资25亿卢比，预计下月竣工。这是印度首批几个有规划的工业园区之一，标志著印度为追赶中国工业规模迈出了第一步。
工业园区外围有一座两兆瓦的发电厂，使园区内工厂不再遭受印度工厂常见的电力短缺问题。当地稀缺的经处理的净水也将直接引入工厂。
但要赢得长期竞争力，印度还需要更多S.P. Apparels Ltd.这样的公司。该公司是Tirupur的大型纺织品生产商之一，拥有自动化生产线，工人的工作效率都由附近办公室里的电脑进行实时监控。公司源源不断接到J.C. Penney、Target Corp.和Gap Inc.的大量新订单，目前正在兴建一座新工厂，厂址就选在现在工厂后面的一块玉米地上。建成后的工厂将能够完成从布匹剪裁到成品包装全套工作。
S.P.办公室经理J. Stanley Jothira一边穿过堆得高高的T恤衫成品包，一边说：“既然市场放开了，我们就有了打入美国市场的大好机会。新工厂的标准和中国工厂一样，他们能够处理的货物量我们也能。”
