Bangladesh

Bangladesh is, for a supplier of industrial machinery, essentially one very large industry with a country attached. Ready-made garments account for the overwhelming majority of export earnings, and a correspondingly large share of what EMM ships here. Cargo lands at Chittagong, which handles most container traffic and is congested enough that clearance timelines need building into the schedule, with Mongla serving the south west and the Matarbari deep-water project under development.

Garments, and then pharmaceuticals

The RMG sector buys at scale and across the whole process: knitting and circular knitting machines, spinning components, dyeing jets and continuous dyeing ranges, stenters and finishing, washing and denim processing plant, automatic spreading and cutting, industrial sewing in large quantities, embroidery, printing, pressing and packing, plus boilers, compressors, chillers and the effluent treatment plant that buyer audits now require. Compliance with Accord and RSC safety standards after Rana Plaza has raised the bar on electrical and fire safety specification, and buyers here ask for proper certification in a way they did not fifteen years ago. Pharmaceutical manufacturing is the second real industry, exporting widely and buying cleanroom, tablet, blister, filling and sterilisation equipment to international standards. Jute processing, leather and footwear at Savar, ceramics, light engineering in Dhaka and Bogra, agro-processing in rice and oil milling, and shipbreaking at Chittagong make up the rest.

Payment and conditions

Imports are letter-of-credit based through Bangladesh Bank channels, and foreign exchange availability has tightened, so we set quotation validity realistically and confirm the price before despatch rather than after. The climate is humid tropical with a long monsoon and genuine flood risk on low-lying sites, which argues for raised plinths, sealed enclosures and tropicalised windings. Power comes in at 220 V single phase or 380 V three phase, 50 Hz, with supply now much improved but not immune to interruption.

Send us your buyer's compliance requirements along with the machine specification. In this market the audit matters as much as the output.