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From home textiles to technical textiles, the impacts of the conflict in the Middle East are being felt throughout the textile industry, not only in terms of exports, but also in terms of raw material imports. ‘JF Almeida is a vertical company and depends a lot on raw materials and yarns bought in the East, and because of this conflict we’ve had serious problems in our supply chain,’ João Almeida from the board of directors admits to T Jornal.
‘We have raw material and yarn at sea with delays of more than two months. The only reason we haven’t stopped production is because we have good supply management and very high stock capacity, otherwise we would have stopped the looms by now,’ he continues. The company from Moreira de Cónegos has been forced to change its shipping routes, in an adjustment that brings extra costs to the company, so as not to cross the Suez Canal.
‘’We feel that transport costs have been significantly affected in our case due to this ongoing conflict,‘’ says Tiago Azedo from Tiajo. The inside sales manager explains that ‘with trade routes constantly being interrupted and, consequently, the search for alternative routes, Tiajo is facing growing financial challenges in the process of importing raw materials’. The company is calling for an urgent resolution to the conflict in order to ‘guarantee stability, not only in the textile sector, but throughout the global economy’.
Despite the more uncertainty, the workwear fabric company continues to invest in more resistant products. ‘We’re about to launch fabrics prepared for industrial washing,’ says Tiago Azevedo first hand. ‘When our partners use our workwear fabrics that are subject to this type of washing, they are looking for low levels of dimensional variation and good colour maintenance over time. That’s why we’re looking to have an increasingly wide range of this type of fabric, which is more resistant to dyeing.’