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Economic chamber od Macedonia

years bsi. ISO
9001
1922 - 2016
Quality
Management

СТОПАНСКА КОМОРА НА МАКЕДОНИЈАFS549642

Osnovana 1922

ECONOMIC CHAMBER OF MACEDONIA

Founded 1922

MY OPINION Serbia and Bulgaria, and several in Albania - our businesspeople and managers
of textile factories will have to modernize their facilities by making investments
in modern machines, especially automatic ones. Next, productivity needs to be
improved i.e. a factory should manage to increase total output while keeping the
same number of workers, thus remaining competitive on foreign markets.

At the moment, textile workers in the Republic of Macedonia have a lower level
of productivity relative to textile workers in neighboring countries. For example,
manufacturing facilities in Bulgaria have undergone intensive automation,
a process assisted by the state and through use of EU funds. In this way, its
manufacturing sector has become more competitive than Macedonia’s. Albania,
a non-EU country that lagged behind in this field, has introduced a series of
governmental policies and support for this sector too, and is now swiftly moving
towards a status of a serious competitor in the region. Macedonian companies
must follow this trend.

A crucial task for the Macedonian textile industry is to use assistance for
transforming the current CMT manufacturing to regular manufacturing.
Analyzes have shown that foreign partners will slowly be moving from CMT
to FOB manufacturing, followed by design-based FOB manufacturing. At the
moment, over 90% of products exported from Macedonia are produced on the
basis of CMT manufacturing contracts. However, an increasing number of
foreign partners are demanding FOB imports, and companies will have to start
adjusting to this trend. This imposes the need for investments in several areas
- starting from HR, staff training, modernization of the production process
(high-quality organization of manufacturing), providing assets for procurement
of raw materials and other necessary materials. State assistance in these
efforts, especially for moving from CMT to FOB manufacturing, will likely be a
determining factor in the survival of this sector in the Republic of Macedonia.
The textile sector must adjust its activities to the market demands, and do so
step by step. Firstly, it needs to start manufacturing its own products under
another company’s trademark, and once it gains experience, launch products
under its own brand.

(The author is a textile industry expert and works
at the Economic Chamber of Macedonia)

May 2016 89