Bangladesh has a new opportunity area in manufacturing of primary garment accessories like labels, tags, buttons, etc. and even cartons, and Meghna Group established by Dr. Abdul Khaleque Buiyan, is one such new entrant in this field. The group is one of the largest Bangladeshi conglomerates having presence in varied fields like automobile, cement, packaging, textiles and is also Bangladesh’s largest bicycle manufacturer. About three years back the company entered into manufacturing of automated cartons for the garment manufacturers and last year forayed into plastic buttons, woven labels, PFLs, offset print, sublimation and heat transfer prints under the name of Uniglory Accessories Ltd. (UAL) and Uniglory Button Ltd. (UBL) with two new factories.
So far only a small portion of accessories used by the Bangladesh garment industry is being manufactured in the country with the balance imported from Hong Kong and China. Now that many brands are diverting their garment sourcing from China to Bangladesh, there is huge scope to produce it locally and reduce dependence on imports. “Local production will help us to be more competitive and deliver in shorter lead times,” says Mostafa Tanveer (Palash), Director, Uniglory Accessories.
In a short period of time, Uniglory has captured a reasonable share of the market, supplying its plastic buttons, woven labels and cartons to almost 200 garment manufacturers in Bangladesh. “In one year we have won confidence of many leading RMG producers. We are getting very encouraging response for our products especially cartons,” informs Tanveer. C&A is the biggest buyer for the company and recently they supplied 15,50,000 cartons in a month which is at best 20% of the total monthly automated carton requirements. “We do both regular as well as customised cartons as per company’s specification. We are now thinking of putting up additional 2-3 fully automated lines to manufacture cartons,” adds Tanveer.
Recently the company has also been nominated by Benetton who after visiting their manufacturing facilities approved their products and production systems – socially and environmentally compliant. “Nowadays buyers ensure that the entire supply chain is secure. Besides seeing our production capabilities at Kaliakoir, which is around 50 kms from Dhaka, they inspected each and every corner of our factory and ensured that we are compliant as per their parameters,” avers Tanveer.
Having already clocked an annual turnover of US $ 15 million per annum, the company is maintaining steady growth of 20% on monthly basis. “We personally feel that cartons have a very promising future for us. There are already many big players in carton manufacturing like M&U, KDS, DBL to mention a few but still there is a huge gap between demand and supply and we feel that we have tremendous scope to grow,” concludes Tanveer who by 2015 is also looking at getting into manufacturing of narrow tapes, while its buttons, which are manufactured on 10 machines will see an addition of 8 more machines within the same premises.
