Industry News
Bangladesh Takes Automation Route
Bangladesh has begun automating the garment sector to thwart competition from countries such as Cambodia and Vietnam.
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 U.S. dollars in exports. Textile and garment products constitute over 80 percent of Bangladesh’s exports.
Smart technology has improved productivity and wages, making Bangladesh’s top factories more competitive globally. Rest of World quoted representatives of the South Asian country’s garments and textile industries, a website focusing on how technology impacts emerging markets outside developed Western countries.
A survey of 20 factories in Dhaka conducted by Shimmy Technologies, an industrial edtech company that upskills garment workers, found that 80 percent planned 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 Rest of World, highlighting the intense competition that emerged from Cambodia and Vietnam.
Media reports said each machine could replace between one and six workers, and the largest factories surveyed anticipated cutting 22 percent of their workforce. “The development is also creating labor issues in the country with many starting to lose their jobs,” they added.
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Workers at a garment factory located on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Automation in the garment sector is expected to create huge job losses.
Various studies and research findings have shown that automation in the garment sector can increase productivity by significantly reducing manual labor 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 minimizing errors and waste, ultimately producing more garments per unit of time.
Cambodia faces a double whammy with predictions of substantial job losses in the textiles and garments sector: one from automation and the embrace of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) and the other from losing the status of Least Developed Country (LDC), which will happen in 2029.
Source: restofworld.org
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