Kazi Iftekhar Hossain, President, Bangladesh Garment Buying House Association (BGBA) has urged the textile and apparel industry to explore the huge opportunity that rising demand for functional items like masks, personal protective equipment, hospital bed sheets and isolation fabric, offers them. Speaking at a recent press conference Hossain said, this will also benefit the backward linkage industries in the country. Bangladesh can easily grab this opportunity as the market size of these items is worth billions of dollars and the country has already set-up garment factories.

The country also employs around four lakh employees in 826 apparel buying houses. However, these buying houses have to bear the cost of their increasing rents and staff salaries.