Chennai floods hit textile business of India

Crippling floods in Chennai due to torrential rains is affecting textile trade in the city as most of the factories are shut and not sure when will it get back to start regular production.

Though Chennai is a big automobile manufacturing and IT hub, it also has more than 500 apparel, leather garment export houses, buying houses and big firms related to textile business.

These includes good export houses in present Chennai like A. I. Enterprises, Meridian Apparels, R. K. Industries, Magnum Clothing, StanFab Apparels, Vijay Enterprises, P. S. Apparels (India) with their collective turnover of about Rs. 800 crore annually.

An estimation was made by Surat – India’s largest man-made-fabric (MMF) textile industry that around Rs. 300 crore worth of orders have been cancelled by buyers in Chennai due to heavy rainfall in the past fortnight.

Also, the supply of textile products to the city has also come down to 80 per cent in the last few days.

Furthermore, the payments of the traders who supply the textile products in south India on credit basis also got stuck due to floods.

Surat was more dependent on the southern part of the country as there was less demand from north India. But, now there is less demand from south India as well due to heavy rains and floods.

It is expected that it may take at least three months for normalcy to return in Chennai. The losses to the textile units may run into hundreds of crores of rupees.