Automation can lead SL to achieve US $ 6bn in apparel exports by 2020

By Nishel Fernando
Sri Lanka has the potential to achieve US $ 6 billion in apparel exports in 2020 by capitalising on automation to get premium prices for the country’s apparel exports with high-quality apparels.
“If you can move to automation, we can do precision cutting, we can manufacture high quality, which means we can get higher prices. With a small number of people, we can produce higher quality apparels. 

That’s what MAS and Brandix are doing,” DMS Garment Technologies (Pvt.) Ltd Managing Director Ruvan Ranataunga pointed out.

He emphasised that automation would help to fast track the export targets of Sri Lanka’s apparel industry.  

Sri Lanka’s apparel industry has set a medium-term export target of US $ 8 billion by 2025, after achieving US $ 5 billion in apparel exports last year for the first time. 

He was speaking to Mirror Business on the sidelines of an event organised by DMS Garment Technologies (Pvt.) Ltd along with Gerber Technology for their partners in Colombo.

Gerber Technology CEO Mohit Uberoi also highlighted that Sri Lanka has many opportunities to take up on automation as it’s mostly the top apparel manufacturing firms in the country that have been utilising automation. Hence, he insisted that the lower end firms could rely on automation for high value addition while bringing down their costs affiliated to labour-intensive manufacturing. 

Ranataunga noted that automation solutions have revolutionised the fashion industry, enabling firms to develop their fashion ideas into products within few days, compared to traditional value chains, which would have taken 42 weeks on average. 

Moreover, automation has also enabled firms to develop new ideas into products at a considerable lesser cost allowing these firms to supply new designs to the changing fashion industry at a faster pace. 

Therefore, he stressed that it’s essential for Sri Lankan firms to move on to automation to stay competitive with regional peers such as Bangladesh, who are relying on cheap and abundant labour as their competitive edge. 

Ranataunga also professed that Sri Lanka’s apparel exporters should also explore developed markets such as Japan and Australia to diversify their markets as the growth in the retail apparel markets of the top exporters of Sri Lankan apparels – the European Union and United States, have slowed down.