Simone Preuss: At the just concluded 32nd IAF World Fashion Convention 2016, which took place on September 27-28 at the Trident Nariman Point hotel in Mumbai, India, particular emphasis was placed on the denim market, as it underwent a revolution in the country from the '80s and '90s onwards and has not looked back since: It currently is a 4.5-billion-dollar industry, which has been growing at 15 percent annually for the last five years. Now, experts are predicting that it will grow to more than 8.1 billion US dollars by 2023. "The denim revolution started in India in the '80s and '90s, which gradually shifted to lifestyle and more so fashion of late. With 7.4 percent of India's GDP growth and a per capita income of 1,362 US dollars, India continues to be one of the largest producers of denim in the world," said Deval Shah, Reliance Brands' business head - Diesel & GAS, at Thursday's session on "New Opportunities in Denim". India is benefiting from cheap prices and high denim demand: He pointed to Bangladesh as a key partner for denim: "With the emergence of denim demand from Bangladesh to which India exports a huge quantity, Indian businesses have doubled their installed capacity of denim to 1.3 billion meters per annum over the last five years, with an estimated investment of 60 crore rupees [9 million US dollars] per million meters," added Shah. But while the number of denim manufacturers has almost doubled from 25 five years ago to currently 42, excess production capacity leads to 30 percent of this capacity remaining idle. For some, decreasing the already cheap price of jeans further would be a solution. "India is selling the cheapest pair of jeans, which is available nowhere in the world. If we bring down the price of jeans to 10 US dollar a piece as is currently prevailing in the US, India's denim demand would increase, resulting in an increase of this sector's growth at 20 percent per annum," pointed out Subir Mukherjee, business head for denim at Bhaskar Industries. Manjula Tiwari, CEO of Future Style Lab, added that "brands are getting disturbed due to a rapid change in fashion and technology". This was the outcome of Thursday's session on "New Opportunies in Denim", a panel discussion moderated by Harminder Sahni, managing director at Wazir Advisors. Other speakers included GAS Jeans founder Claudio Grotto; Anurag Asthana, vice president (PD & sourcing) Myntra Designs and Sanjay Vakharia, director at Spykar. World Fashion Convention focused on sourcing, retail, technology and branding: The two-day International Apparel Fashion (IAF) event was organised jointly by the Clothing Manufacturers' Association of India (CMAI) and the Union Ministry of Textiles and the Union Ministry of Commerce. It attracted more than 500 participants, among them 250 Indian apparel and denim brands and manufacturers and industry representatives from about 20 countries across the world. Other sessions discussed new opportunities in sourcing, retailing, technology and branding. "E-retailing is going to be the next growth opportunity in the Indian textiles and apparel sector in the next few years", stated Aniruddha Deshmukh, managing director and CEO of Mafatlal Industries Ltd when speaking on the significance of online retail for the apparel market. In terms of trade, Francesco Marchi, director general of EURATEX, highlighted the need to initiate a dialogue on the free trade agreement (FTA) between India and the European Union and the United States, especially in view of the UK pulling out of the EU: "The Indian government should start negotiations for the FTA with the EU and the UK for the benefit of the Indian apparel sector. It is hard to imagine the success of the FTA without the UK, post Brexit. UK continues to be a textiles manufacturing hub, contributing 29 percent of the entire apparel trade in the EU. Twenty-two percent of India's exports to the EU goes through UK," he advised. The Clothing Manufacturers' Association of India (CMAI) also signed a memorandum of understanding with the China Chamber of Commerce for the Import and Export of Textiles (CCCT) to explore potential areas of mutual cooperation for increasing apparel exports from India and to make use of any market share not utilised by Chinese apparel manufacturers. The 33rd IAF World Fashion Convention will take place in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, on October 17th and 18th, 2017. Photo: Jörg Brinckheger / pixelio.de. Source: https://fashionunited.in/
