As Chairman of APS Group and a Director of BGMEA for the 2025–2027 term, Dr. Md. Hasib Uddin believes Bangladesh’s apparel industry stands at a pivotal juncture. While the country has built a globally competitive manufacturing base over the past decades, evolving buyer expectations, sustainability regulations, digital traceability requirements, and intensifying regional competition are redefining what competitiveness means.
In this new landscape, scale and cost efficiency alone are no longer sufficient; productivity, innovation, operational excellence, and measurable impact have become equally critical.
In this exclusive interview with Fashion Business Journal, Dr. Hasib Uddin shares his assessment of Bangladesh’s RMG sector in 2026 and explains why innovation must become the industry’s next growth engine. He also discusses the vision behind the Textile Innovation Exchange (TIE), an industry-led platform designed to help factories systematically identify, implement, measure, and scale practical innovations.
From strengthening factory capabilities and accelerating sustainability performance to bridging the gap between industry and research, he outlines how TIE aims to transform individual success stories into a broader ecosystem of continuous improvement and long-term competitiveness for Bangladesh’s apparel sector.
FBJ: As a BGMEA Director, how do you assess the current state of Bangladesh’s RMG industry in 2026?
Dr. Md. Hasib Uddin: Bangladesh’s RMG sector remains our national backbone, but 2026 is a genuine pressure-test year. Apparel exports stood at US$35.31 billion during July to May of FY2025-26, a 3.41% decline year-on-year, while May 2026 shipments alone fell 8.29% to US$3.59 billion.
In the first half of the fiscal year, exports slipped 2.63% to US$19.37 billion, and shipments to the European Union, still our largest destination at roughly half of all exports, contracted 4.41%. These are warning signals, not collapse.We still export to over 150 countries, our green-factory credentials genuinely lead the world, and our compliance maturity is real and respected.
But scale and low cost alone will no longer carry us, especially against the sector’s ambition of reaching US$100 billion in exports. Future competitiveness must now rest on productivity, right-first-time quality, traceability, data-readiness, and verified sustainability.
FBJ: Bangladesh’s apparel industry is often recognized for manufacturing strength. How can innovation become the next competitive advantage for the sector?
Dr. Md. Hasib Uddin: Manufacturing strength gives Bangladesh volume; innovation will give us quality, margin, and durability. Consider the evidence, a 2026 study in the Journal of Circular Economy, modelling Bangladesh as the production base, found roughly 44% of fibre input is lost during manufacturing stages alone, and that improving process efficiency could cut carbon impact by about 10% and other impacts by 20-25%.
Also Read : Beyond Price: Why Sustainability Will Define Bangladesh’s Denim Future
Separately, lean-manufacturing trials in our own factories have shown lead-time reductions near 35% and efficiency gains of around 25%. Buyers increasingly reward exactly this, stable quality, lower resource use, and traceability. The EU Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles is pushing products toward durability, repairability, and recyclability. Without an operational-excellence and innovation-management ecosystem, Bangladesh simply cannot leap to the next level.
FBJ: What gaps in the industry does Textile Innovation Exchange aim to address that existing initiatives have not fully solved?
Dr. Md. Hasib Uddin: The key gap is that factories do improve, but those improvements are rarely measured, documented, repeated, or showcased credibly. Private-level excellence like closed-innovation becomes a firm’s advantage; it does not become a national advantage unless it is curated, benchmarked, scaled and diffused as the open-innovation. Textile Innovation Exchange (TIE) is formed to close that gap by helping factories systematically identify, test, implement, measure, and scale practical innovation.
It operates through four integrated wings: Innovation Wing, which installs factory execution systems through Partnership for the Implementation of Innovation Circles (PIIC); Research Wing, which converts factory problems into credible knowledge; Self-Readiness Index and Recognition Wing, which benchmarks and rewards; and Expo Wing, the adoption marketplace.
At present we have rolled out the PIIC, the Textile Innovation Awards, and the Textile Innovation Expo, scheduled for 12 to 14 November 2026 at International Convention City Bashundhara (ICCB) in Dhaka. Textile Innovation Exchange bridges industry, academia, suppliers, and brands, because buyers now demand data, evidence, and verified sustainability, not only capacity.
FBJ: As a Steering Board Member, what is your long-term vision for TIE?
Dr. Md. Hasib Uddin: My long-term vision is for TIE to deliver exactly what the industry needs at this moment, and to become Bangladesh’s national reference point for practical and commercially viable textile and apparel innovation. Its vision is to strengthen our competitiveness through systematic, practical implementation of innovation.
We need a true 360-degree ecosystem where factories improve, researchers solve real factory problems, achievements are recognized, and innovations are showcased to global buyers.
The urgency is real. India’s textile Production Linked Incentive scheme carries a 10,683 crore rupee, roughly US$1.18 billion outlay, alongside seven mega textile parks backed by a further 4,445 crore rupees, all aimed at capturing Europe’s market, where the EU imports US$125 billion in textiles annually.
Vietnam and China are also moving very fast indeed. Without our own ecosystem, heavily incentivized peers can gradually surpass us. Conservatively, if even a tenth of manufacturing waste is recovered across our factories, the sector could retain hundreds of millions of dollars annually, money currently lost to rework, scrap, and missed shipments.
FBJ: How can small and medium-sized factories benefit from innovation initiatives, not just large manufacturers?
Dr. Md. Hasib Uddin: Small and medium factories can benefit the most, because they often cannot afford large automation but can transform through better systems. TIE’s Partnership for Implementation of Innovation Circles (PIIC) is built as a four-month, factory-embedded implementation system with Innovation Circles, mandatory project-management training, factory-selected skills programmes, expert support, evidence packs, and follow-up.
Drawing on our implementation partner– Textile Today Innovation Hub (TTIH) experience, which has delivered 250 projects across more than 80 factories since 2018, this approach helps SMEs reduce defects, save water and energy, sharpen delivery discipline, and prepare for the EU’s Digital Product Passport and traceability requirements, which apply to textiles from 2027.
The model is deliberately low-capex, working on what factories already control, such as, defect rates, rework, downtime, cutting waste, steam use, wastewater treatment and reuse, transition to renewable energy, and utilities intensity, etc. Crucially, it makes them more credible to buyers. For a small or medium factory, innovation is not a luxury at all. It is survival, upgrading, and the surest pathway to higher value and better margins.