The country's knit apparel industry has undertaken a plan to improve productivity and reduce production cost through adopting time saving methods, report agencies. The Bangladesh Knitwear Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BKMEA) would implement the plan with funds from the European Union under its Small Project Facility (SPF). "EU recently responded positively to the BKMEA overture and agreed in principle to give 100,000 Euros to implement the project," a BKMEA executive said news agency Monday. He said factories would be able to reduce labour costs by one-third after successful implementation of the project. A Productivity Improvement Cell (PIC) would be responsible for designing the one-year project, aiming to help factories adopt some internationally accepted methods and ensure highest level productivity, he said. Meanwhile: A single country knitwear exposition of Bangladesh will be held in Germany in the third week of April this year. BKMEA President Fuzlul Hoque said the single country exposition would be held as part of the bid to expand its market in Germany. The likely venue of the show is Frankfurt or Dusseldorf, but the decision in this regard has not been taken yet. The exposition will create direct link between the buyers and the suppliers, which will help the expansion of the market. Sources said participants of the exposition would bear all costs. The export of knitwear from Bangladesh to Germany was $ 668 million in 2004-05 fiscal. Sources also said knitwear export was more than double in the last two fiscals in the German market, the largest knitwear importer after the execution of the duty-free access to the EU market. The BKMEA president said that "Karstadt Quelle, one of the biggest buyers in Germany, has assured us of increasing import 50 per cent over last year's."
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