The textile and apparel industry in Indonesia must work towards improving its competitiveness in face of increasing trade cooperation agreements between nations and globalization of the world trade, Director General of Industrial Manufacturing (BIM) Harjanto said while inaugurating the Uniform and Workwear Fair 2014, organized by the Ministry of Industry in Jakarta.
The textile and clothing industry is one of the strategic sectors that continue to make a significant contribution to Indonesia’s economy, in the form of providing employment as well as earning foreign exchange, Harjanto said.
The textile industry in Indonesia absorbs a large amount of workforce. In 2013, about 1.55 million people were engaged in the country’s textile sector and around 570,000 people were employed in the garment sector. In recent years, the garment sector has become one of the highest foreign exchange earning sectors for the country and in 2013, the value of garment exports reached 7.3 billion dollars, or 60 percent of the country’s total textile exports.
Harjanto said the increase in the value of Indonesia’s clothing exports is the result of hard work an innovation of the textile industry in the face of increasingly intense global competition. The existence of trade cooperation agreements with other countries also makes trade competitive, and this challenge must be addressed carefully by the textile industry by improving production efficiency and marketing strategies, he added.
