Sunday, July 13th 2014
BY S VENKAT NARAYAN Our Special Correspondent
NEW DELHI, July 10: Sri Lanka’s leading apparel company Brandix is planning to expand its production facilities in the Brandix India Apparel City in Vizag or Visakhapatnam in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh by investing another $750 million to take up its total investment there to $1 billion from $250 million at present.
This will make the Sri Lankan company the biggest investor from the island to date in India. The investments made in Sri Lanka by several Indian companies during the past decade amount to barely a billion dollars.
The plans were conveyed to Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Nara Chandrababu Naidu by Brandix Lanka’s CEO Ashraf Omar in Hyderabad on Thursday during Sri Lankan External Affairs Minister Prof GL Peiris’s meeting with Naidu.
"Naidu responded positively to our plans," Omar told the Sunday Island from Colombo on Saturday.
"He promised to extend whatever help is required for this, and even asked us to spread the word among other Sri Lankan and foreign investors about Andhra Pradesh being an ideal place for investments."
"We are hoping to complete the investments in our Vizag facility in the next three to five years," he said.
When the investments are done, the Brandix India Apparel City will provide jobs to 60,000 people, most of them Indian.
The facility is spread over an area of 1,000 acres in Vizag, about 40km from the port. The entire production here, worth $200 million every year, is exclusively for export to the company’s clients the United States and Britain, shipped from Vizag and Chennai ports, Omar explained.
He said the fabric is procured primarily from Andhra Pradesh, and ready-to-wear undergarments produced in the facility for wellknown global brands such as Victoria’s Secret, Marks & Spencer, and Calvin Klein are then exported.
At present, the company employs 15,000 Indian workers in the Vizag plant. In addition, it has trained 20,000 other Indians too. After getting trained, they moved on to work elsewhere or to set up their own little outfits, Omar said.
Prof Peiris informed the Sri Lankan company’s investment plans to his Indian counterpart Sushma Swaraj during their luncheon meeting here on Friday. She too welcomed the plans with enthusiasm, External Affairs Ministry spokesman Syed Akbaruddin said.
From : http://island.lk/index.php?page_cat=article-details&page=article-details&code_title=106682
