In order to maintain the competitiveness of the country’s textile and textile products (TPT) in the global market, the Indonesian Textile Association (API) has requested the local players in the industry to regularly upgrade their production facilities.

Most of the textile makers in the country presently are relied on old textile machineries and were getting more reluctant to invest more in the backdrop of weakening global demand, said API chairman, Ade Sudrajat.

Ade recommended the government facilitate collaboration between local businesses and textile machinery manufacturers in India, deemed as one of leading nations in the industry, to deal with the issue.

“Indonesia and India can deepen their cooperation, by, for example, providing credit facilities for the purchase of [textile] machinery,” Ade said recently, after attending an event in Bandung to introduce the 10th India International Textile Machinery Exhibition (India ITME-2016).

India currently had at least 1,000 manufacturers of spinning and dyeing machinery, Ade said. There are 45 million workers in the textile industry alone in India, a home to around 1.2 billion people.

Indonesian textile exports have failed to make significant progress over the last five years partly due to declining orders from the country’s main trading partners, including Japan and the US. Data from the Central Statistics Agency (BPS) show that the amount of textile exports remained stagnant at around US$13 billion since 2011.

Another reason to choose India as a trading partner, Ade continued, was because the price of textile machinery was as cheap as China-made ones.