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Sri Lanka apparel industry to lose US$1.5bn as Coronavirus cripple buyers
ECONOMYNEXT – Sri Lanka’s apparel industry is expecting to lose 1.5 billion US dollars’ worth of revenue between March to June as the Coronavirus from Wuhan sweeps through western markets, battering economies.
“Finally, the impact we feared would come from our customers has hit us very badly,” Rehan Lakhany, President of Sri Lanka Apparel Exporters Association told EconomyNext.
“The impact has been quite massive; we are estimating the loss to be in the region of about 1.5 billion dollars which accounts to the revenue from March to June (almost a quarter).
Initially, the industry expected the loss of orders to be around 200-500 million US dollars.
Sri Lanka’s apparel industry accounts for almost 40 percent of the total exports and 52 percent of merchandise exports while contributing 6 percent to the GDP.
Buyers Crippled
As a high revenue export industry, it brought in 5.5 billion US dollars out of the total 11.9 billion dollars of foreign revenue in 2019.
The US and Europe are Sri Lanka’s largest apparel export markets accounting for almost 90 percent of the turnover.
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