Massive volumes of contraband textile enter Iran every year and hamper local production.

Smuggled products make up around 25 per cent of Iran’s annual apparel market.Presently, the lion’s share of apparel smuggled into Iran are off-season brands sold at discounted prices that happen to be even lower than the production cost and that of the raw materials combined with price tags no one can compete with.

There has been a 18 per cent rise in smuggling of textile industry products into Iran the last fiscal yearcompared to the year before. Import of apparel into Iran has been banned for many years now.There has been an apparent decline in the value of Iran’s apparel market. The declining purchasing power of average Iranians and the Covid pandemic to a lesser extent have been cited as the reasons for the decline. Manufacturers want support and urgent measures to combat contraband apparel in the market.

A total of 900 million square meters of textile are imported into Iran every year. Close to 3.6 billion square meters of different kinds of textile are consumed in the country annually, some 2.7 billion square meters of which are produced domestically and the rest has to be imported.