Refayet Ullah Mirdha

Last month, Monir Hossain, a garment factory owner, missed a deadline for exporting T-shirts to his UK buyer through the seaways.

Sanofi’s top management has agreed to pay service benefits to employees in the form of gratuity and provident fund before selling off its shares in Bangladesh, said some employees.

A German garment buyer stayed at the Narayanganj club over the last two days for visits to MB Knit Fashion Ltd.

Thanks to steady economic development and higher incomes of people, Bangladesh has turned into a lucrative market for multinational retail companies, said Rajeev Gopalakrishnan, president of the Asia-Pacific region of Bata.

Swedish retail giant H&M is the largest apparel buyer in Bangladesh. Every year, it buys more than $3 billion worth of garment items from the country. Recently, the company appointed a Bangladesh-born country manager for the first time. Last week Refayet Ullah Mirdha, a senior reporter of The Daily Star, sat with Ziaur Rahman, head of H&M for Bangladesh, Pakistan and Ethiopia, for an interview. Here are the excerpts:

In a desperate move for better prices, Bangladeshi garment exporters are planning to hold rallies and human chains in major European cities to create awareness among the end consumers.

The crisis in the leather and leather goods industry has deepened further as the tanners are yet to pay Tk 350 crore in arrears fully to the rawhide merchants.

The Savar Tannery Industrial Estate (STIE) and the tanners are still a long way off from meeting the requirements of the vital Leather Working Group (LWG) certification although the audit team of the global compliance certification body is scheduled to visit Bangladesh within two months.

Leather and leather good exporters are gung-ho about hitting $5 billion in export receipts by 2022 if the government manages the Leather Working Group’s certification at the earliest, according to industry insiders.

With great hopes, Yih Hang, a Taiwanese shoemaking machinery manufacturer, is participating in the 7th International Leathertech Show at the three-day International Convention City Bashundhara in Dhaka.

Fifty-nine garment factories have been shut and 25,900 workers have lost jobs in the last seven months, BGMEA President Rubana Huq said.

Bangladesh’s cotton consumption will continue to grow in the near future because of higher shipment of garment items stemming from the US-China trade war and for higher demand for natural fibre by Western consumers, said a top official of Cotton USA, an association of American cotton growers and traders.

South Korean industrial infrastructure developer Korea Industrial Complex Corporation (KICC) wants to develop an industrial park for housing 100 Korean companies operating in Bangladesh.

Sanofi is now packing its bags to leave Bangladesh for strategic reasons, said the managing director of its local operations, bringing an end to weeks of speculation and denial.

Non-tariff measures or NTMs are now affecting around 58 percent of trade in Asia and the Pacific because of their growing popularity as weapons of trade policy in regional and global trade tensions, according to a new report yesterday.

control method on US cotton at its ports as the raw material is fumigated at warehouses prior to shipment, allowing the country to save on import costs and time, importers and suppliers said.

The government is losing millions of dollars a year in taxes from the foreign nationals who are working without taking any work permit in Bangladesh, according to Bangladesh Investment Development Authority (Bida).

Sanofi employees have demanded compensation package from the country chair of the drug-maker as the French pharma giant’s repeated claims of not leaving Bangladesh fail to convince them.

Receipts from merchandise export declined 7.3 percent year-on-year to $2.91 billion in September for a slowdown in shipment of garments and other major products.

Despite sharing a long border, Bangladesh is still a very tiny source for merchandise for India due to a lack of diversification of products and non-tariff barriers.