At a time when government has started responding to the genuine needs of the businessman, the general public should demand more accountability, result and service from our businessmen. BBBF should take note.
I wanted to start this article with something like this: businessman should get in business and learn how to use their brains in addition to utilize the competitive advantages that they get for free. For free? Yes, its the cheap labor that they have been capitalizing on so far, its time to go beyond the traditional competitive mindset and produce some result. However, then there mind be another hue and cry from this community that their confidence is being hampered as it is the case in many issues with this community of ours (which has been whining for sometime now).
So, for the sake of improving the tone in our public discourse, I decided to rephrase the article as follows. Hopefully, the business will hear the message embedded before its too late. We all know what happens when a group of professionals fail to respond to the need of the time and serve the people’s aspiration. Here is the rephrased article for your reading:
Bangladesh earns a huge amount of forex from garments and knitwear industry.
If I ask you to mention few brand names from these two industry, how many can you mention?
Moreover, what do they do well if there are some big garment industry? Can you distinguish one industry from the other looking at their products other than the fact that they are from Bangladesh? In other words, they have become big industries – but how? Did they learn to use their brain or did they just took advantage of being from Bangladesh? You may say – well, whats wrong with from being Bangladesh? No, No, we are not saying that there is something wrong with being from Bangladesh. Actually, being from Bangladesh brings some advantages for these businesses. They get cheap labour. And they get easy access to foreign markets. Using these two advantage being awarded by their countrymen, they do business. Its all well. It should be a starting point. They should not stop there. Value addition should end with a creation of popular brands at the product level. Let us ask a easy question plainly – to our NRB members. When you go to a retain store of any kind in North America or Europe (two major export markets for our garment and knitwear industries), can you readily say that a certain product is from Bangladesh without looking at the "Made in Bangladesh" tag? It would be very surprising if some of you answer this question in the affirmative. It should be a taken as a challenge by our business community to change this scenario within a couple of days. We should establish at least few brand names that can be recognized without looking at the tag.
Next issue that we want to raise is related to the other issue. If it has been so far the case that success is coming from the cheap labour and the national level preferential treatment, what has the businessmen done to give back? I know what some of you might say – well, they are providing employment. True, for many working women and men, they have been helpful. But those are barely enough. These business houses that are earning billions of takas, they should have a much better trackrecord of giving back to the society. Moreover, they should also share their wealth with their nation. Their should be a cap-limit where the companies will be asked to offer ownership to the public through IPO.
Now many would also disagree on this issue. However, if these business houses offer public share and raise additional funding, they can use that additional resources to invest in creating brands of their own – and thereby addressing both of the limitations that we raised in the previous two paragraph. Hopefully, it will be done sooner than later.
If you thought some of the ideas are worth of your reading time, please forward it to others. If you have an ear to the columinsts in regular traditional media, please forward it to them. If you have an ear to the journalists and news editors of the electronic media, discuss it with them. Hope they would look at the suggestions and give due diligence.