E-Market for Textiles

A rather interesting project is being promoted by the Indo-Italian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, along with partners from Italy (Citer), Spain (Asintec) and Greece (Clotefi) besides, of course, several Indian and Italian textile and apparel firms. The project involves setting up of a virtual Marketplace

About 20 companies from Italy, Spain and Greece and about 25 Indian companies, almost all from Chennai, would be participating in the venture, which is aimed at helping the participants improve their competitiveness. European participants in the venture expect to achieve faster decentralization of their production processes by outsourcing more from Indian producers.

The project is being partly funded with assistance from the European Commission, under its ASIA-IT&C (Information Technology and Communication) program. Participants would be exchanging technical information online through a secure website. Most of the participants are small and medium enterprises. While European participants have turnovers in the range of US$8-45 million, Indian participants have turnovers in the range of US$1-5 million.

What kind of capital expenditure the project would involve isn't clear, but it seems that the idea is to facilitate better communication within a group of firms. As such, e-marketing has not been very successful in the case of textiles and apparel, but the situation is certainly still fluid. The possibility of some mechanisms becoming commercially viable can hardly be ruled out.

Indian firms are trying to make more productive use of the Internet. Among things that are being sorted out are ways of ensuring that e-mails evoke better responses (without being charged as spam), positioning of websites and evaluating incoming mails and new websites for assessing the respectability of the owners. The Textile Committee, a statutory body, is holding several workshops to educate small and medium enterprises on these aspects.