Sourcing Textiles and Apparel from India

Three Interdependent Sectors

The report's organising insight is structural: India's textile and apparel industry rests on three major sectors — the mill sector, the powerloom sector and the handloom sector — which are interdependent rather than separate industries, and all three make products exported to the rest of the world. A sourcing reader needs all three in view, because the same product category can be produced in different sectors at different prices, qualities and scales. That is why the report pairs its sector examination with data on prices by product category: the price of an Indian textile or clothing product only makes sense once the sector producing it is known.

Markets, Prices and Case Studies

Alongside the sector analysis, the report analyses textile and clothing imports into India's major markets — the demand side of the sourcing equation, showing what India's customers actually buy and from whom India competes to supply it. Case studies of importers and manufacturers are presented, grounding the market analysis in individual businesses: how importers buy from India, and how Indian manufacturers produce and sell for export. For a company approaching India for the first time, the case studies translate the industry's almost 15 million people of scale into named, understandable operations.

Buyers, Selling Agents and Contact Details

The report's directory element is lists of major apparel buyers and selling agents, given together with their contact details. In a market organised through intermediaries as much as through direct factory relationships, the selling agent is often the practical first contact for a foreign buyer, and the buyer lists identify the demand side of the trade by name. Read together with the companion special report on India's textile and apparel industry — which examines the industry's competitiveness product by product in the US and EU markets after the elimination of quotas at the end of 2004 — this report gives a sourcing team both the structure of Indian supply and the contacts through which it is reached.

How a Sourcing Reader Uses This Report

The practical sequence the report supports runs from structure to names. A buyer first establishes which of the three sectors — mill, powerloom or handloom — produces the product category in question and at what indicative prices; then reads the import analysis for the market the goods are destined for; then studies the importer and manufacturer case studies for operating detail; and only then turns to the lists of major apparel buyers and selling agents, approaching the named contacts with a realistic picture of how Indian supply is organised behind them.