Foreign clothes, shoes, ornaments, cosmetics and other items, both imported and smuggled took a significant share in the more than Tk 10,000 crore Eid market across the country.
Sellers say that high-spending consumers in the country have a liking for foreign goods.
Shopkeepers said that domestic manufacturers need to compete with overseas products in quality, prices as well as with better marketing skills.
Many consumers, they said, traditionally favour imported goods, and their growing purchasing power provide a good market for imported stuff, said Shoeb Ahmed, a shop keeper in the city’s Polwel Market, known as a wholesale and retail hub.
Buyers are attracted to the over 200 shops in the market selling Thai jeans, shoes, slippers and Chinese waist belts and fancy non-cotton T-shirts and leather items from Italy.
Shop keepers jointly import goods in containers, said Shahabuddin, a representative of Polwel Market Shop Owners’ Association.
Shop owners in Dhaka and Chittagong, he said, import nearly Tk 1,000 crore worth of fashionable clothings and other items, much of which are sold during the Eid.
Dhaka Metropolitan Shop Owners Association president Helal Uddin said that shops in the city’s posh malls prefer to sell foreign goods.
Foreign goods were getting easy access into Bangladesh through both formal and informal channels, he Helal, also a director of the Federation of Bangladesh Chambers of Commerce and Industry.
Many of Dhaka’s 200,000 shops and more than 500 modern shopping centres sell foreign goods, said the association representatives.
Helal said that at least a third of Eid sales is accounted by shoes from Thailand and Taiwan, cosmetics from Europe and America and fashion wears from India and Pakistan.
The retail sales during the Eid, worth over Tk 10,000 core, accounts for more than 20 per cent of the country’s annual retail sales, said a Bangladesh Super Market Association representative.
Representatives of the associations of shop-keepers and super market owners described Eid sales this season as pretty good with the middle class people spending handsomely.
Rampant smuggling of foreign goods by evading taxes flooded the market, said Harun-Ur-Rashid, chairman of Asian Textile, which once had a major share in the domestic market of fabrics for shirts, trousers and suits.
He said that dumping of foreign goods was harming domestic industries.
`We believe in open market, but the authorities must take steps against dumping and smuggling of foreign goods that enter Bangladesh evading taxes to destroy the level paying field,’ he said.
