Ethiopia11 Sep 2018 07:03
Bagir ahead of the curve with their 100% Ethiopian factory already up and running and about to get a $16.5m cash injection from Ruyi who will be keen to develop, expand and increase production. Bagir's order book will very likely soon, be full to the brim with new business and supply contracts which no doubt will be transformational for Bagir's sales revenues and profitability. Gla ;-)
China Is Turning Ethiopia Into a Giant Fast-Fashion Factory
The project is Beijing’s big experiment in outsourcing, and a $10 billion shot in the arm for the African nation
Hawassa Industrial Park did go up quickly, thanks to a state-owned Chinese construction company that banged out 56 identical hangar-size, red-and-gray metal sheds devoted to textile production in nine months, for $250 million, according to the Ethiopian Investment Commission.
Lured by tax incentives, promises of infrastructure investment, and ultracheap labor, countries the Western world once outsourced production to, particularly China and Sri Lanka, are now the middlemen ramping up production here for Guess, Levi’s, H&M, and other labels.
These industrialists like Ethiopia because the government wants them as much as they want cheap labor and tax breaks. The Hawassa Industrial Park’s inauguration is only the most recent part of a vast centralized scheme: Since 2014, Ethiopia has opened four giant, publicly owned industrial parks; it plans eight more by 2020.
The industrialists who set up shop here are exempt from income tax for their first five years of business and absolved from duties or taxes on the import of capital goods and construction supplies. Ethiopia can swing such largesse because it gets lots and lots of money from China: $10.7 billion in loans from 2010 to 2015, according to the China-Africa Research Initiative at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.
Right now much of the money is being spent on lucrative contracts for Chinese companies that, with help from Ethiopian labor, are building dams, roads, and cellular networks. This infrastructure, the Ethiopian government says, will allow the country to join the global middle class. “The plan is to create a total of 2 million jobs in manufacturing by the end of 2025,” says the Ethiopian Investment Commission’s Belachew Mekuria