Grow by 34.63pc in Sept despite overall fall

Bangladesh’s readymade garment exports to the United States in September 2022 increased by 34.63 per cent although the country’s overall apparel exports declined by 7.52 percent in the month.

Exporters attributed the shifting of orders from China to the increase in Bangladesh’s apparel exports to the US.

Amid the global economic slowdown, Bangladesh’s apparel exports to the US in September 2022 increased by $234.83 million compared with that of the same month of 2021, according to the latest US Department of Commerce’s Office of Textiles and Apparel data.

The US is the largest export destination for Bangladesh.

The import of apparel by the US from China in September 2022 fell by 9.78 percent to $2.17 billion from $2.40 billion in the same month of the previous year.

‘There are two reasons for Bangladesh’s export growth in the US market. One is shifting of orders from China to other manufacturing countries and another is increasing demand for knitwear products on the market,’ former Bangladesh Knitwear Manufacturers and Exporters Association president Md Fazlul Hoque told New Age on Sunday.

He said that the US buyers were shifting their orders from China in large volumes and Bangladesh was getting a portion of the orders.

Not only Bangladesh, but some other countries, including Vietnam and India, were also getting the share of orders being shifted from China, Fazlul said.

Before the pandemic, Bangladesh’s export item to the US was mainly woven garments, but the demand for knitwear increased on the market for the past two years, he said.

Fazlul, however, said that export growth in the US market would fall in the coming months as the overall demand for apparel was going down due to the economic slowdown caused by the Russia-Ukraine war.    

The data showed that Bangladesh’s RMG exports to the US in January-September of 2022 increased by 50.98 percent to $7.553 billion from $5 billion in the same period of 2021.

The total US imports of RMG from the world in the first nine months of 2022 increased by 34.61 percent to $78.85 billion compared with that of $58.58 billion in the same period of the previous year.

According to the OTEXA data, Bangladesh’s position remained unchanged as the third-largest apparel exporter in the US market with China and Vietnam occupying the first and the second highest positions respectively.

The US apparel imports from China in January-September of 2022 grew by 28.94 percent to $17.72 billion from $13.74 billion in the same period of 2021.

RMG imports by the US from Vietnam in the nine months of 2022 increased by $34.69 percent to $14.59 billion from $10.83 billion in the same period of the past year.

India’s RMG exports to the US market in the January-September of 2022 grew by 53.39 percent to $4.63 billion from $3.02 billion in the same period of the previous year.

RMG imports by the US from Indonesia in the first nine months of 2022 increased by 54.66 per cent to $4.44 billion while the imports from Cambodia grew by 46.58 per cent to $3.52 billion in the same period, the data showed.