Page 42 - bne magazine September 2021_20210901

42 I Southeast Europe bne September 2021
Albania has become an important centre for clothing, shoes and accessories production.
Stitching Albania’s garment industry back together
Clare Nuttall in Glasgow
Some prominent figures in the international fashion and beauty industry were optimistically forecasting a new “roaring twenties” and an explosion in consumption even as most of Europe went back into lockdown earlier this year. For Albania’s garment manufacturing industry, which supplies famous brands in Italy and elsewhere, this is a far-off dream. With orders still sluggish, for now it’s a question of slowly stitching back together an industry devastated by the pandemic.
As in other sectors like car manufacturing and electronics, which also have complex international supply chains, the clothing and textiles sector suffered sudden demand and supply side shocks in the early months of 2020. The initial disruptions to supplies from China, followed by factory shutdowns in Europe and elsewhere as the
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pandemic spread around the world, was accompanied by a slump in demand as people stopped going out – and to a large extent stopped buying new clothes – during the spring 2020 lockdowns.
The burden fell especially hard on companies and their employees in lower income countries – among them Albania – supplying western markets.
The textile and footwear sector is the single largest category in Albania’s exports; in 2019 exports in this category amounted to ALL118bn, 40% of the ALL299bn of goods exported during the year. Of that total, ALL92bn – almost
a third of all exports – was textile and footwear products exported to Italy.
Albania’s strength in this area dates back to the communist era, when textile production and garment manufacturing
was one of the most important sectors
of the economy, with state factories supplying the local population and producing for export. The Kombinat Stalin Textile Mill in the outskirts of Tirana employed over 2,000 people in its heyday. Today, Albania is no longer a major textile producer, and its factories, now privately owned, many of them by Italian businesspeople, import materials that are then turned into partially or fully finished garments or shoes then re-exported. Data on this industry, dubbed ‘facon’, is incomplete, but Albania is estimated to have around 1,000 companies engaged in garment manufacturing, employing up to 90,000 people.
Aside from Albania’s previous history in the sector, the ‘facon’ industry developed thanks to Albania’s low costs – this is a labour-intensive sector and Albania has the lowest minimum