Garment exporters, currently dominated by cotton garments, are in the process of tapping synthetic and blended garment segments in a big way, which constitute about 70 per cent of global demand, a top official in Tirupur Exporters’ Association (TEA) has said.

Tirupur, which exported garments worth Rs 18,500 crore last year, has a share of Rs 2,500 crore to Rs 3,000 crore in synthetic and blended garments, mainly winter garments, TEA president A Shaktivel told PTI.

Despite overall continued growth and demand for garments from this town, no extra effort was taken to increase the share of garments made of man-made fibre, like clothes of synthetic fibre, Shaktivel said.

Through Knitwear Technology Mission (KTM), which commenced its operations in Tirupur, it would be easy to produce garments using synthetic fabric, which hitherto was manufactured after imports from China, he said.

The frequent fluctuation on higher side in the cotton yarn prices also put the knitwear segment in problem, decreasing profit margin, the man made fibre, which was steady, would be helpful to tide over the crisis, he said.

Claiming that exporters in Tirupur were seeing an opportunity in synthetic garments, as labour costs were increasing in China, which dominate the global synthetic garment business, Shaktivel said that though China was cheaper than India, the price difference was now now thinning down.

Tirupur can get business throughout the year with the synthetic garments and the exporters were catering to the demand of spring and summer garments in Europe and US markets, which accounted for about 48 and 25 per cent respectively, he said.

Another major market emerging was fluorescent jacket used by police officials during night, which was estimated at four billion US dollars across the world and the medical textile and sports wear segment was also emerging, with blood stain free and capable of absorbing sweat, giving comfort to players and looked up as performance wears, he said.

On investments, he said that the circular knitting machine that were used for making cotton fabric costs Rs 10 lakh-30 lakh, the average cost of a machine that produces synthetic fabric is around Rs three crore.

Processing was another major challenge, which required high pressure dyeing machine, he said.