Crystal Group Allays Fears Of Automation Taking Over Garmenting Jobs

Apparel, Footwear, Fashion

Crystal Group Allays Fears Of Automation Taking Over Garmenting Jobs

The world’s largest apparel maker, in terms of volumes, namely the Crystal Group from Hong Kong has announced that it has no intention of replacing cheap labour with automation in the textile sector in the immediate future.

The Group is known to be making clothes for several of the global clothing giants like Gap, L Brands, H&M, Fast Retailing and so on. Reports from the research firm Euromonitor place it on the top of the global chart in terms of volumes of clothing production. It enjoys the status of having had the biggest IPO in the Hong Kong Stock Exchange from 2015 onwards.

CEO Crystal Group, Andrew Lo, gave the message with an emphasis, stating, “Contrary to expectations that we would be investing R&D money for automation in wake of mounting labour costs in China, we are not interested. This is so, despite the fact that globally players are bracing themselves for robots to take over manual tasks that are repetitive.”

In a media interview he expressed the sentiment that though robots sounded interesting and had the capability to change the methods adopted by companies to manufacture clothes, at least in the near future, they are not good enough to replace cheap human labour on the cost front.”

The Group envisages a 10% annual rise in human resources that are employed in the garment sector in two of the lowest wage countries, namely Vietnam and Bangladesh. Both these countries have well-developed garment hubs.

In the current scenario, the Crystal Group is manufacturing nearly two-thirds of its garments and apparels from countries like Bangladesh, Vietnam, Cambodia and Sri Lanka. Garment manufacturers find this proposal attractive as they can opt out of China where labour costs are continually rising and manufacturing has turned expensive.

In the current scenario the garment industry provides mass scale employment for semi-skilled and less skilled workers in Asia that teem into millions. Industry professionals are observing the automation trends and studying how it will impact the situation. This cautious approach on part of industry comes in wake of a warning issued by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) that automation could result in robots replacing most of the clothing, textile and footwear workers in the third world countries like Cambodia, Vietnam and Indonesia. The warning was issued with the coming decades in mind.

The cautionary note sounded in the warning was that for circumventing this human crisis, the employers and the respective governments must ensure that the less skilled workers are imparted skill training at the earliest.

There is also another reason that inhibits Hong Kong’s Crystal Group from automating low-end clothing manufacture jobs and getting rid of less skilled workers. The reason cited was that robots were more suitable for handling stiff materials and they are not good enough for fabrics that are flexible and tend to stretch and distort in the process of sewing.