Pakistan has imposed antidumping duties ranging from 3.25 per cent to 11.35 per cent on imports of polyester filament yarn from China and 6.35 per cent on imports from Malaysia. This has not gone down well with the user industry, which says it has to pay antidumping duties of upto 75 per cent of its requirement of polyester filament yarn, which is a burden. They feel they are being unnecessarily penalized. The antidumping duties would increase cost substantially for the user industry. Besides, fabrics manufactured from polyester filament yarn and garments made of art silk fabric are also exported and imposition of antidumping duties would hurt exports worth millions of dollars, besides creating unemployment for thousands of skilled workers.

The total requirements of the art silk fabric manufacturing industry, which mainly consists of small and medium-sized units, are more than 2,20,000 metric tons per annum. However, four local producers of polyester filament yarn have the capacity to produce only around 8,500 metric tons of fully drawn textured polyester filament yarn, which is only four per cent of the total requirement of the downstream weaving industry, and producing around 53,000 metric tons of drawn textured polyester yarn, which is only 25 per cent of the total requirements of the downstream weaving industry, while the remaining 75 per cent requirement is met through imported yarn.