Bangladesh's Corporate World

Beximco Group took the opportunity to help the world in the time of COVID-19 and started manufacturing personal protective equipment. Coronavirus has changed the world. Beximco Group is trying its best. The brand is otherwise a major supplier  of Zara, Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger. Beximco Textile division exported 6.5 million medical gowns to US brand Hanes in May. It plans to export $250 million worth of protective gear this year. 60 percent of its 40,000 workers are engaged in PPE making. Bangladesh over the past two decades became the world's second-largest ready-made garment exporter after China, making clothes for the likes of Primark and H&M. Before the pandemic, it accounted for around 80 percent of the country's $40 billion annual exports and employed more than four million people, many of them women from poor rural villages. But when the world started to go into lockdown, the country's 4,500 manufacturers saw shipments plunge by a staggering 84 percent in ...

Prime minister Sheikh Hasina on announced a new stimulus package to waive Tk 2,000 crore bank interest of the people affected badly by the nationwide shutdown enforced to contain the coronavirus pandemic. The premier made the announcement while formally publishing the SSC and other equivalent exam results through a videoconference from her official Ganabhaban residence in Dhaka. She said the government earlier suspended the payment of interest of the loans for two months which the people took from the (commercial) banks for business purpose. After Bangladesh was hit by COVID-19, the government led by Prime minister Sheikh Hasina, started working out effective policies. She is assisted by her advisors including the Private Sector Industry and Investment Adviser Salman F Rahman. ‘Today, we’re declaring a new incentive package which is the 19th. Under the package, the borrowers need not to repay Tk 2,000 crore interest of the credits which they took from the banks for doing busi...

Cost of foreign import financing by the country’s local banks increased up to 2 percentage points in the last couple of months due mainly to a slump in earnings of the banks. Earnings of all scheduled banks slumped, in most of the cases turned negative in April and May, as the Bangladesh Bank asked the entities to refrain from booking interest earnings for the two months, bankers and BB officials said. Earlier, most of the foreign banks were issuing credit against imports at around 2.5 per cent to 3 per cent interest. The fall in earnings of the banks has prompted the overseas banks and financial institutions to charge up to 5 per cent interest for such credit. Some of the foreign entities were found reluctant in issuing credit against the country’s import settlement. Amid the coronavirus outbreak in the country, the central bank has introduced a number of relaxations for the bank borrowers as business and economic activities have come almost to a halt. Under the relaxations, the ban...

Bangladesh’s leading Beximco Group announced it will set up a plant in Detroit, U.S., to make masks as demand for protective gear in the U.S.The Dhaka based company, which started selling the generic version of Gilead Sciences Inc.’s antiviral drug in the South Asian nation, announced it would invest $20 million in the Detroit plant. The company will also invest $30 million on a plant at home.The company will initially supply N95 masks in Detroit before expanding to other parts of the U.S. Beximco’s textile unit is tapping new opportunities as luxury brands from New York to Paris scrap garment orders amid the pandemic. The company expects the Detroit plant to be ready in nine months, while the one in Bangladesh will start production in four months. Beximco said Hanesbrands Inc. bought 6.5 million personal protective equipment from the company to supply to the Federal Emergency Management Agency on May 25. Beximco Group is a multinational conglomerate holding company headquartered in D...