Giant textile plant in the pipleline

November 05, 2010 | 17:40
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Four leading Japanese firms are seeking to build the largest vertical integrated textile and garment manufacturing project in Vietnam.

The four investors behind the $180 million plan are Pacific Textile Holding Limited, the Crystal Group, the GSI Creos and the Toray Group. They are leading garment and textile manufacturers in Japan and in the world, with annual revenue of between $750 million and $1.4 billion.

Photo - Le Minh

According to the investors, this would be the biggest vertical integrated project in Vietnam, since it would focus on an integrated manufacturing process from knitting to dyeing, printing, cutting, sewing and finishing products.

The project which has the first phase to be carried during 2011-2015 will have an overall investment of $180 million, comprising $120 million in textile production and $60 million in garment manufacturing.

During the first phase of operation, the project will be able to churn out 108 million metres of fabric and 92 million pieces of garment products annually.

It is projected to employ 11,000 workers, including 3,000 workers in textile factory and the remaining 8,000 workers in the garment plant.

The investors are looking for 40-80 hectare site in northern Vietnam, which is close to the national way and water resources to build the manufacturing cluster. They previously targeted to set up their project in the Thai Binh province, which is also the biggest rice region in northern Vietnam. The investors were refused by local government with such a big land requirement.

“We want to create a cluster, where we will also build our own water supply plant and waste water treatment facility,” said a project’s representative.

“Our textile plant will need some 60,000 cubic metres of water a day, which is too big for any water plant’s capacity in the locality. That is why we need to set up our own water plant,” the representative said.

The Pacific and Crystal firms already cooperated to build Regent Garment Factory Ltd. in northern Hai Duong province in 2006, which is capable to produce 32 million pieces of garment products a year.

The four investors now stressed the new integrated garment and textile project would help ease fabric shortage in Vietnam while helping increase the country’s garment and textile exports in the future.

They have currently had many world clients including Uniqlo in Japan, Wal Mart, JCPenny, Gap in the United States and Mango and H&M in the Europe.

Vietnam is importing a lot of fabric for local manufacturing as local supplies are still in shortage. In the first 10 months of this year, the country imported $4.33 billion worth of fabric, up 25.9 per cent against last year’s same period.

Local firms are anticipated to spend some $4.7 billion on imported fabric this year, up from $4.2 billion reported in 2009.

By Hieu Anh

vir.com.vn

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