Celebrating the release of the book, ‘Resolute By Design,’ Rajeev Masand, President, Clothing Manufacturers Association of India (CMAI) felicitated its author Deepak Seth, Chairman, Pearl Group of Companies for his tremendous growth from a small time garments exporter to a global conglomerate spanning over 22 countries and production facilities across the world.

The book has been written by journalist Rajendra K Aneja based on the experiences shared by Deepak Seth.

Expanding group operations

A non-executive chairman of Pearl Global, the listed subsidiary of the company, Seth has over 31 years experience in the apparel industry. He has been responsible for expanding the group’s operations to 12 countries across the world including Hong Kong, Bangladesh and China. Seth also set up Pearl Group’s new manufacturing units in Bangladesh and Indonesia besides acquiring existing businesses in the US. He was a member of the Apparel Export Promotion Council from 1990 -1993 and was inducted as the Executive Committee as a special invitee.

Starting operations with a small order of 6,000 pieces in 1976, the Pearl Group has since grown into a global conglomerate shipping over one million garments every day. The group’s current turnover is $1.5 billion (Rs 12,000 crore) which it aims to increase to $2.00 billion in the next three years. Its achievements remain unparalleled amongst Indian garment companies.

Business acumen an inspiration

Attended by CMAI members, the felicitation program included narration of stories and anecdotes from Seth’s 45-year journey in the industry. It focused on the lessons learnt by Seth over the years. The event was a commemoration of Seth’s single-minded focus on his goals, his untiring efforts, initiatives to improve workers’ productivity and his instillation of trust, transparency, equity and ethics in his company’s operations.

The felicitation program also included an informal interaction between Seth and Rahul Mehta, Chief Mentor, CMAI, both alumni of the Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management.

Interesting ‘takeaways’ of the interaction

Few of the interesting points that were discussed during the informal interaction of Deepak Seth with Rahul Mehta like Seth feels that benchmark or cut off point of an entrepreneurship could be perhaps around 500 machine capacity as it is possible to manage personally but above that capacity one should ideally look at engagement of the professionals to have a stable growth.

Seth explained that he has always been very keen on looking out for any opportunities of partnership where they could improve including investing in any startups if useful technology is involved.

Talking about productivity of the workers, Seth observes that culture everywhere is different but workers are the same but it is how we train them and how we take work from them. He feels supervisors and middle management is week in India, in south there’s no hunger for overtime whereas in north the migration workers work slowly during daytime to get overtime. If you set up the right team of supervisors and middle management, Indian work force is also not bad. On the other hand, Bangladesh workers are very committed; they work for 12 hours/day, hungry to do overtime. In our Vietnamese factory for our factory of 1000 machines, we manage with only 1500 work force, whereas we may need 2000 or 2500 people here in India, there’s no alteration or defect there’s no quality issues for the products cut, manufactured and packed in our Vietnam factory. The workers there are quite educated and feel guilty if fault is found. In Indonesia, we make very high quality garments.

The interaction highlighted the management philosophy of Pearl Group’s organizational culture and business philosophy that has inspired the Harvard School of Business to study it as a case study.

According to the Vietnam Textile and Apparel Association (VITAS), the country’s textile exports grew by 17.7 per cent to $22.3 billion in the first six months of the year.

The after-tax profit of Vietnam National Textile and Garment Group (Vinatex) grew by 49 per cent to VNĐ573 billion Q2.

The firm attributed the rise in profit to its high volume of cotton in storage, which resulted in low production costs amid mounting cotton prices.

The revenues and after-tax profits of TNG Investment and Trading JSC grew by 35.7 per cent and 42.3 per cent to VNĐ2 trillion and VNĐ87 billion, respectively.

The PhongPhú Corporation raked in over VNĐ160 billion in profit, surpassing the figure in Q2/2021 by 11 per cent.

Although many firms were riding high in the second quarter, some others saw their profits eroded by rising costs.

The ThànhCông Textile Garment Investment Trading JSC earned just VNĐ55 billion in Q2, down 6 per cent against Q2/2021. The company said higher overheads and exchange rate fluctuations cost it over VNĐ75 billion, eating into its profits.

Century Synthetic Fiber Corporation’s profits fell by 2 per cent in profit due to soaring financial costs. The costs ballooned from VNĐ320 million to over VNĐ15 billion, driving its profits down to VNĐ69.4 billion.

The Hanoi Textile Garment JSC ran unprofitably as it incurred higher financial costs and elevated costs of sales. It made a loss of VNĐ5.4 billion in Q2, a stark contrast to the profit of VNĐ6.2 billion in the same period last year.

According to VITAS, the outlook of Vietnamese textiles is not very optimistic in the second half of the year as the risk of COVID-19 resurgence is still high.

On top of that, many of Việt Nam's commercial partners have been tightening up their preventive measures against COVID-19, fuelling the situation, it adds.