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Ceramic tableware manufacturers in Bangladesh are predicting a huge boom in their business as a result of the swingeing new taxes slapped on Chinese products by the European Commission at the end of last year.
Many Chinese ceramic tabletop and kitchenware lines exported to Europe are now subject to anti-dumping duties that increase their dockside price by up to 58.8%. The move is intended to protect European manufacturers against competition from China, which an EC investigation decided was selling its products at artificially-low prices.
However, when the new taxes were announced in November, the British Retail Consortium warned that they would in fact do nothing to help European producers. It said they could not manufacture tableware cheaply enough, and retailers would therefore simply look around for another source of low-cost tableware.
Now, manufacturers in Bangladesh are looking forward to cashing in. “We’re expecting to capture the lion’s share of the global ceramic market after implementation of the EC’s decision,” Rizvi Ul Kabir, chief operating officer of Bangladesh’s largest ceramics tableware producer, Shinepukur Ceramics, told Bangladeshi newspaper The Financial Express.
He added that the company was now expanding its plants to cope with the anticipated demand – as, says the newspaper, are all Bangladesh’s other tableware producers.
According to The Financial Express, the country’s ceramic tableware industry had until recently been growing at up to 15% a year. Bangladesh Ceramic Wares Manufacturers Association president Iftakhar Uddin Forhad explained that recession in the EU and the US had put paid to that, but he added: “But we will rebound after the EC’s decision.”
