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31 Aug 2009

Industry

ASEAN: Thailand’s Important Textile Export Markets (Business Brief No.2616)

คะแนนเฉลี่ย
Despite the fact that ASEAN countries are Thailand's major rivals in garment exports, particularly Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Indonesia that have an advantage in lower labor costs and receive GSP benefits from the world's leading importing countries such as the USA and EU, ASEAN is also an export market for upstream and mid-stream textile products such as woven fabrics, yarn and synthetic filaments. This is because they are developing rapidly and have growing exports of garments as downstream textile products.
Meanwhile, their upstream and mid-stream material production is still insufficient to their demand, or the quality is not high enough to export, so they have to import raw materials to produce export garments. Thailand is an important source of those materials because of the tariff privileges derived from the ASEAN FTA, common borders that offer lower freight costs and the convenience of rapid delivery. Another important reason is Thai quality that is widely accepted in the global market. At present, ASEAN accounts for around 28.5 percent of Thailand's upstream and mid-stream textile raw material exports.

It is expected that in the future, garment exports from ASEAN countries that have lower production costs will have a more important role in the global market. Moreover, the ASEAN FTA and its gradual import tariff reductions for member countries to duty-free status to be enforced January 1, 2010, will result in ASEAN depending more on raw materials from each other. Thailand's readiness to supply quality textile raw materials will be very helpful to ASEAN.

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Industry