The Hindu Business Line : `Indian textile market fastest growing in 2004'

India is emerging as the fastest growing textile market, while several of the Western markets, including the UK, France, Italy and Germany seem to have reached saturation, according to KSA Technopak data.

Albeit on a comparatively smaller base, the domestic textile and clothing market was the fastest growing in 2004, clocking around 8 per cent. The Chinese market grew at 6-8 per cent during the year, according to KSA Technopak data. India, along with China and Pakistan, is expected to offer the maximum opportunity to its textile and clothing producers from its own internal market over the next 10-15 years.

In case of the developed markets, however, the growth was stunted during the last year, with similar trends predicted for the next few years. In fact, with the sole exception of the US, there has been deceleration in demand in nearly all other major textile markets in the developed world.

"The sluggishness in the Western textile markets has been on account of both a marked stagnation in the population growth as well as the rapidly ageing population, which has resulted in a shift in expenditure patterns and a rise in value retailers," a textile sector analyst said.

The Indian textile and clothing market, which was worth around $26 billion in absolute terms last year, is expected to grow into a $55-billion market by 2016. Also, with India and China home to the highest population of young people in the world, the textile demand is these countries is expected to gain in strength over the years. In fact, the Indian market could be bigger than the projected size of the Japanese, German, French and the Italian markets by 2016, according to KSA Technopak data.

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