Where Technology meets Business meets Social Welfare ...

摘要

Just over a year ago, we had reported, as had the rest of the media, the travails of a leading textile manufacturer in the country, who also happens to be one of the leading terry towel manufacturers globally. As a quick recap for the uninitiated, the said company, with a strong business base in its exports to the USA, had majors like Bed, Bath & Beyond, Target, Walmart, and JC Penney, amongst others forming a significant portion of its sales portfolio. In its large ongoing consignments of cotton bed sheets being shipped to these customers, the assumption that Egyptian cotton was in use was challenged by one of the customers saying the cotton used was of a lesser quality, constituting a breach of faith and contract. This breach caused the customer to suspend all its incoming supplies from the said manufacturer, and had many others follow suit. This had a profound impact on the fortunes of the manufacturing company with an immediate crash of its share prices by about 42% and wiped out nearly half its market cap in a couple of days at the time (though a short-term phenomenon). In a larger context it also compromised the ethos of the Government's "Make in India" campaign which was at its zenith in terms of its overseas investor pitch at the time, and also a sense of distrust towards Indian textile manufacturing companies.