Bangladesh turns to automation to beat Cambodia in RMG
Staff Reporter :
Bangladesh has begun stepping up automation in the garment sector to thwart competition from countries such as Cambodia and Vietnam, according to various media reports.
The garment industry contributes about 11 percent to Bangladesh’s GDP.
It’s the main driver of the country’s economy, employing millions of people and generating billions of US dollars in exports.
Textile and garment products constitute over 80 percent of Bangladesh exports.
Smart technology has improved productivity and wages and made Bangladesh’s top factories more globally competitive.
Representatives of the South Asian country’s garments and textile industries were quoted by Rest of World, a website focusing on how technology impacts emerging markets outside of developed Western countries.
A survey of 20 factories in Dhaka by Shimmy Technologies, an industrial edtech company that upskills garment workers, found that 80 percent of them were planning to buy semi-automated machines in the next two years.
“If we can’t bring in the automation, the competitors will win the market,” Ayaz Aziz, general manager at Shimmy, told the rest of the world, highlighting the intense competition that has emerged from Cambodia and Vietnam.
Each machine could replace between one and six workers, and the largest factories surveyed anticipated cutting 22 percent of their workforce, media reports said. “The development is also creating labour issues in the country with many starting to lose their jobs,” they added.
Speaking to Khmer Times, Robert Hwang, Chairman of the Cambodian Garment Training Institute, said that he is not in a position to comment as he is not aware of the ongoing developments within the textiles and garments sector of Bangladesh.
Various studies and research findings have shown that automation in the garment sector can increase productivity by significantly reducing manual labour time in repetitive tasks like cutting fabric, sewing, and quality checks.
Automation will also allow workers to focus on more complex operations, improving overall production speed and efficiency while minimising errors and waste, ultimately producing more garments per unit time.
Cambodia faces a double whammy situation with predictions of substantial job losses in the textiles and garments sector, one from automation and the embracing of Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) and the other from losing the status of Least Developed Country (LDC), which is set to happen in the year 2029.