A new survey identifies Bangladesh’s readymade garment industry, and five other sectors, as the highest potential growth segment for the coming decades. LightCastle Partners, reported in its survey of 102 top executives across 12 leading Bangladeshi industries in Dhaka and Chittagong. The confidence index was targeted at gaining an in-depth understanding of the business of private sector players representing varied industries across the economy.
The survey showed business confidence went up from “low-to-moderate confidence of +39” in 2016 to “a cautiously optimistic confidence level of +43” in 2017. The index is determined on a scale of -100 to +100. Some serious areas of concerns were the classified loans condition, bureaucratic red tape for doing business, the fall in readymade garment prices, transportation and logistical issues and infrastructure problems such as port congestions which were decelerating the natural growth rate of business.
Further, power outages have increased production costs and final prices as businesses including apparel manufacturing are heavily depend on backup generators. Bijon Islam, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of LightCastle, says Bangladesh needs to move export reliance on the garment sector, helping ease of doing business and improving infrastructure/logistics. A deeper look at the report suggests business leaders are confident about verticals like power and energy, ICT and agriculture, while cautious about sectors like readymade garment, banking and finance, real estate and logistics.
