The growth of Pakistan’s leather industry has been constantly moving downward as a result of decrease in total exports since long.
In 2007-2008, the industry produced annual export of $1.22 billion which was trimmed down to $ 1 billion during the year 2013-2014. The government is equally responsible by creating unfavorable policies instead of back-up to surmount the hardships of the industry’s development.
The industry’s leaders raised their voice towards governmental departments to provide sufficient electricity without any disruption that helps in providing stability to the leather industry. In addition, the industry correspondents reported that the continuous lack in growth will bring horrible consequences over the Industry that will cause uncertainty within the international investors. The industry diplomats further observed that total leather export is already moving in negative growth rate sliding to 14 percent in such region where the other countries like China, Bangladesh and India enjoying amusing growth rates.
Moreover, they have been demanding the government to exempt all the leather tanning factories from electric load shedding since the leather tanning sector is a non-stop functioning processes and extensive schedules of electricity shutdowns will destroy the quality leather production and will lead to unusual financial loss of tanning businesses.
The curse of load shedding greatly impacts over the quality of leather tanning resulting in bulk complains of customers and portray bad picture of the country across the globe. Around 1 million of employments are associated with this sector through directly and indirectly and major part is from lower income class.
According to the chairman of Pakistan leather industry.” The primary reality that causes in diminishing the growth of leather industry is heavy energy short-fall and unscheduled electric and gas load shedding.” The chairman further added that in-spite of negative growth; Pakistan leather industry has the tendency to produce world class leather if government takes infallible measures on our demands and ensures to give uninterrupted electricity and gas.
Agha Saiddain chairman of FPCCI stated that, the processes of preparing leather require small percentage of energy consumption in comparison with textile industry, spiraling and weaving. Likewise, the consumption of gas is also not too much in leather processing mechanism. He further claimed that, if government pays attention to this crisis, our industry is capable to uplift the exports of leather from 1.4 billion to $3 billion in the upcoming 2 to 3 years.
At this time, around 95% of the tanned leather is being exported in the form of finished goods such as shoes, jackets, apparel, and other leather items. China emerges as Pakistan’s well-wisher by offering their services in overcoming power shortage dilemma to newly established government and the government is interested to catch this opportunity to get rid from this menace in the earliest manner. Therefore, the chairman of Pakistan leather industry association is expected that leather tanning units will be shortly exempted from terrible power shortfall.
