Outlook Business - Smart Enterprise - P Sudhakar - video Dailymotion

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P Sudhakar, chairman, CII Karur district speaks to Outlook Business on the occasion of Smart Enterprise 2016.   #PSudhakar #SmartEnterprise #Business #OutlookBusiness #OutlookMagazine #OutlookGroup

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00:00 I'm Sudhakar, Chairman of CII Karur. Karur as you might know has been traditionally a

00:16 textile manufacturing centre. Textiles and Karur go hand in hand for at least the last

00:21 100 years. The textile industry in Karur started in a very traditional way, in a very primitive

00:30 way with hand looms, weaving fabrics that were being sent out to different parts of

00:36 the country and that's how Karur was known as a textile centre throughout the country.

00:43 Karur does an export of about 4000 crores today and in fact sells to globally reputed

00:50 retailers including the largest company in the world, Walmart, the biggest importer of

00:54 textile in the world, IKEA, and to companies like Target, JCPenney, Macy's, Crate and Barrel

01:02 and companies like John Lewis or Tesco or you take the second largest retailer in the

01:07 world, Carrefour. So these are companies that buy a lot of textile products out of Karur.

01:13 And Karur, though it has been in the business for the last 100 years, there has been a stagnation

01:21 that has crept into this market and the business has not actually been growing in the last

01:27 5 or 6 years. Now CII as part of its effort to grow the economy of Karur and the textile

01:36 export being the prime driver of the economy of Karur wanted to do something about this.

01:41 So CII took the effort to do a detailed study. As part of its effort, it looked into diversification

01:49 as one of the options and after a lot of study, a lot of deliberations, a lot of consultations

01:54 with the industry, the CII arrived at a solution for the Karur textile industry. So that came

02:01 into being the garment cluster in Karur.

02:08 The garment cluster in Karur follows a unique model, the ACI, which stands for aggregate,

02:14 consolidate and integrate. Instead of just having a number of fragmented manufacturing

02:20 units, there is one central driving unit which is the core of this cluster. The second part

02:28 of the cluster is the common facility centre which is funded by the government of India.

02:33 There are a lot of synergies between apparel and garment, I mean apparel and home textile.

02:40 Both the industries use fabric, both the industries dye their fabric and both of them cut and

02:45 sew and come out with the final product. Just that the apparel market is a much bigger market

02:50 and an ever growing market and there are a lot more opportunities in that market. And

02:56 our neighbour Tirupur who export about 25,000 crores worth of garments have fixed up a 1

03:04 lakh crore target for the next 5 years. So we thought like why not we share a part of

03:10 that target, why not we contribute to that target too. To start with there were a lot

03:16 of hesitation because like this is a completely new business for us. So thus came the idea

03:21 of the central driving unit. Now the driving unit has taken up all of the, I would say

03:27 most of the responsibilities for the business for the first 2 years. This includes marketing,

03:34 the central unit would be marketing for the entire member units, recruitment and training

03:39 of manpower, purchase and negotiation for raw materials and machinery and even the cutting

03:47 of fabric would be happening in the central unit for the garments that are being made

03:51 in the member units. The member units initially would only be doing the finishing part of

03:57 the garment and would be packing them and exporting them. Now the idea is to gradually

04:03 make the member units learn the different processes. Now this cluster is not a one time

04:09 cluster for the 20 member units that are already members of the cluster. This is going to be

04:15 a continuous process where new members are going to be added. Now this is a model that

04:21 is unique and the model is going to be highly technology driven and we have picked up the

04:27 best practices from some of the best clusters in the world. We are starting off the cluster

04:34 and the units at very high compliance levels for factories which would meet the requirements

04:41 for any of the reputed global retailers and we for sure have started seeing that there

04:48 is a lot of interest from globally reputed retailers to start using this cluster for

04:53 manufacturing products that they want. This is about the garment cluster in Karur and

04:59 to get to know more about it, please join us at the Outlook Business Smart Enterprise.

05:07 See you there soon.

05:07 (upbeat music)

Outlook Business - Smart Enterprise - P Sudhakar

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