The Turkish textile manufacturer, Etur Textile has announced on Monday that it will start exporting its products to markets in Europe and America having conducted successful trial exports to Algeria and Morocco.
According to Adil Basoglu, board member and executive director of Etur, the factory has fully embarked on production and it will soon start export into the larger overseas markets.
Etur Textile, one of the largest textile factories operating in Ethiopia, is located in Wonji road, six km from Adama town in the south east of the capital Addis Ababa.
According to the executive director, the textile factory aims at becoming the biggest exporter in the country.
“We have moved here to become more productive and help out the countries vision in the sector,” Basoglu said.
Hiring more than 800 employees, the factory has stepped up its production to start export in full capacity. However, employees complain of meager wages, a portion of which is deducted for the recruiting agency but the company denies.
“We have no clear response for that since we know we are paying them relatively higher salary,” Basoglu said.
Basoglu said high turnover of employees is forcing the company to bring in untrained labor which is only aggravating work-related accidents inside the main production units. “We have no clear response for that since we know we are paying them relatively higher salary,” Basoglu says. In addition to this Basoglu also told journalists visiting the company that dust blowing up from the gravel road by adjacent to the factory is set up has also been affecting business in the production unit. “We have told the city administration so many times but no quick response yet,” Basoglu said.
Currently there are 110 textile companies in Ethiopia of which Turkish, Chinese and Indians are major contributors for the textile and garment export which has reportedly grown by 28 percent year on year during the previous fiscal year (2012-2013). Under the five years Growth and Transformation Plan, currently on its final year, Ethiopia aims to earn USD one billion from the textile industry. But the country is still far from achieving the target mainly plagued by shortage of raw material such as cotton.
In the last five months of 2014, Ethiopia imported more than 3,000 tons of cotton to meet the demand of domestic textile industry as a short-term measure, Textiles Industry Development Institute (TIDI) said this week.
[TheReporterEthiopia]