In the year 2013, the global apparel and textile industry has raised many questions about the compliance and workers’ safety levels of apparel manufacturing facilities in Bangladesh. With the non-compliant factories working in full-swing to comply and make their workplace much more safer and sustainable, companies like SQ Group who have been compliant and safe from the day one of its inception have actually gone a step ahead, envisioning to setup 6 green factories by setting up two new green factories and converting all the existing factories into green facilities, affiliated by The US Green Building Council (USGBC) for LEED Certification. Bearing the sole responsibility to accomplishing this mammoth task,
Aruna Muthumuni, CEO, SQ Group, shares with Apparel Online the vision of Group’s Chairman Ghulam Faruq and the path of sustainability the company has chosen.
An ex-world banker Ghulam Faruq started SQ Group two decades back as a sweater manufacturing facility with only 160 hand flat knitting machines in Mirpur. Six years later the facility was moved from a rented space in Mirpur to a world-class factory in Mawna, Gazipur, which presently in-houses a total of 2,500 hand flat knitting machines and was designed by one of the most famous Bangladeshi architects and an alumnus of Edinburg University. Having acquired a niche in sweaters, SQ Group established its lingerie and shirt manufacturing facilities in 2007 as a joint venture, which later bought out its partners to claim 100% ownership.
“Why put all eggs into one basket, was the reason for venturing into three totally different products,” asserts Aruna. He further stated, “Sweater was very obvious as it was our first product. Lingerie was previously dominated by China and Sri Lanka, having huge growth potential for Bangladesh. Similar is the case with shirts due to US trade benefits and both are critical products yet to be tapped by Bangladeshi companies,” continued Aruna, who has been with the SQ Group since 2008. Besides the sweater facility, the company has setup the ‘SQ Station’ spread out in 30 acres of land, which comprises of the shirt, lingerie, wet processing and an upcoming knitted fabric manufacturing facility.
The two green factories of SQ Group should be a part of the SQ station only and the sweater factory would be the ‘first green sweater factory’ in Bangladesh, claims Aruna. “This idea didn’t pop in our minds just like that as it was our Chairman’s commitment since our first factory was setup 20 years ago. All our factories are going to be green and the existing factories will be converted to green factories and the two new constructions happening are all audit registered under USGBC. One we are planning for gold and another one for platinum,” he added. It is not just the factories SQ Group would also be setting up a ‘Green Bustle’, a place where all the benchmarks in green building construction would be showcased for the industry to see and learn from. “All this is a part of our company’s business strategy,” asserted Aruna.
The lingerie products manufactured by SQ Group are hard to be found in Bangladesh as the company claims to compete with the top lingerie manufacturers of China and Sri Lanka. “The lingerie products manufactured by us include stitch-free bonded products and we are the only company in Bangladesh to make shape-wear items,” shared Aruna. Having bought over by its partners in 2010, the lingerie division had 10 sewing modules, which has now expanded to 50 sewing modules.
[bleft] Lingerie is a very unique product as an entire garment is made in only a minute and for doing the same, all inefficiencies and wastages have to be eradicated from the sewing lines, else one will end up with colossal losses. Not all have found success in this and companies have even failed in Sri Lanka even though skilled labour was present in the country. [/bleft]
These modules are not regular sewing lines rather highly flexible groups of sewing machines working with single piece flow, comprising of 6 to 22 sewing machines. “In my belief, assembly lines limit the process of production planning and scheduling, whereas one can always restructure the sewing groups to manufacture a certain style in the most efficient manner, eradicating the bottlenecks of underutilization of man and machine, waiting time and lower needle time,” explained Aruna. Presently producing 2.5 million pieces per month, SQ Group plans to add 70 sewing modules to its present setup of 50, and adding another 1610 machines towards the existing setup of 1150 machines. Moreover, the knitted fabric manufacturing facility would be specialising in fabrics and trims for lingerie items only, and would be functional by May 2014.
Compared to sweater and lingerie, shirts is the smallest business of SQ Group with 8 sewing lines and 250 sewing machines, producing 2,50,000 shirts per month. The plan is to add 12 sewing lines by next year in the new upcoming green building and by 2015 it would be a setup of 40 sewing lines, producing a total of 1.5 million shirts per month.
“Our shirt factory was started with a British partner, for producing formal shirts for M&S and initially we thought of closing this facility as it was too small for us, but our existing customers supported us and asked us not to close the same. That is when we realized our strength in this product category,” explained Aruna. Doing formal shirts majorly for European buyers like C&A and Sainsbury, the company would like to get into casual shirts in the longer run.
Presently we are producing 1 million sweaters per month and planning to do 2 million by the end of 2014, for which the company is in the process of installing 1400 automatic jacquard knitting machines from Shima Seiki. “Our present turnover is US $ 100 million and by next year we plan to achieve US $ 300 million. Once the shirt facility is fully functional we will be able to do US $ 100 million from shirts alone and the group turnover would touch the mark of US $ 350 million. All our expansions are in the direction of achieving the half billion mark,” concluded Aruna.
