One of our reputed customers, who is into textile industry, launched their beta site on Oct 6th. In 30 hours they surpassed their sales projections for the first month and became a success story. The website is built in such a way that they were able to make their outstanding product / services reach out to the market. Client is overwhelmed with the response received from online orders received from the website. Manual marketing is slowly switching over to the digital edge and Mind Spark Technologies plays vital role in providing technical consulting to improve their productivity. . Sometimes the impetus we need to get something done is to remind ourselves of why a website is important in the first place. In this case, there are quite a few benefits: • Prospective clients can find you: This is one of the most important reasons to have a business website. People are looking online for your services. When they search, will they find your business? If they can’t find you, they can’t hire you. • Prospective clients can learn more about you: People want to know more about the people they’re considering hiring. For B2B service professionals, this is especially important because even when you meet people in person, they will look you up online to learn more about you. When people search for you online, they should find a professional website that provides information about you and your business. • You can convey your credibility: If someone is considering hiring you, they’ll want to know about you, your background, and your experience. A good business website should include an “About” page that provides this information as well as testimonials about your work. • You can showcase your solutions: As a service professional, you help clients solve specific problems and your website can show prospective clients how you can help them (and if your business doesn’t help someone with a specific problem, you might need to rethink your business!). • You can share your expertise: A website with a business blog is a great way for you to share information about what you know. This gives prospective clients an opportunity to learn more about how you can help them. A blog also helps with search engine optimization, since it helps search engines to find your website and serve it up in the search results, which will drive more traffic to your site. • Generate leads: Once someone finds your site, make it easy for them to contact you. Prospective clients should be able to fill out a form, pick up the phone, find an email, or otherwise contact you easily so that you can follow up with them. • Serves as a hub for your social media profiles: If you are not yet using social media, you should reconsider that decision. Social media is a great way to ensure that information about your business and services can be shared online, making it easier for people to find out about you and how you can help them. Your website then becomes the glue that holds it all together. • Collect contact information from people interested in your services: Wouldn’t it be great to have access to a list of people who are interested in your services and who have voluntarily given you permission to contact them about how you can help them? You can do this with newsletter signup form on your website. However, having a website doesn’t mean that you should have just any website. Let’s face it, some sites just don’t look good! They may be old or outdated, be cluttered, have a “Free website by…” at the bottom, or otherwise make a less than stellar impression. That is something you cannot afford. To really get the benefits of a website for your business and create your own success story, your site will need to serve as a professional online presence that conveys your credibility, showcases your solutions, and makes it easy for people to contact you. Additionally, it should be optimized so that people can actually find it when they search online. And, it should be easy for you to update on your own, without being tied to a web developer every time you need to make a change to your site. Contact us to create a website for you and allow us to be a part of your success story too!

The $250 billion textile industry in India has many heroes. There are big brands from Bombay Dyeing, Raymond, Grasim Industries, and more, which dominate the textile market. However, there are thousands of mid-sized and smaller brands jostling for consumer attention in this highly competitive market, which, after agriculture, is the second-largest employment generating sector in India. Akash Bansal. (Photo by author) From hand-spun and hand-woven segments to the more capital-intensive power looms and hosiery and knitting segments, the textile industry covers a wide spectrum. And thanks to Flipkart, Myntra, Jabong, and Amazon’s focus on fashion, as a consumer you do not have to travel far to find this variety. Ludhiana’s rage The SMBStory team, however, travelled to Ludhiana to capture the stories of some of these brands. After Tirupur, Ludhiana is the hub for knitwear, hosiery, and woollen garments, contributing nearly 95 percent of the country’s woollen knitwear. Tucked in one of the bylanes of the industrial Focal Point area just outside the city, stands a nondescript, one-storey building that houses the office and factory of Rage Knitwear. The brand has 25 exclusive brand outlets (EBOs) and over 500 multi-brand outlets (MBOs) and departmental stores throughout India. Its merchandise includes cardigans, knitted tops, woven blouses, dresses, tunics, jumpers, capes, ponchos, etc for women. Rage has had Bollywood celebrities like Priyanka Chopra, Katrina Kaif, Diya Mirza, Sameera Reddy, Riya Sen, Mallika Sherawat, and Jacqueline Fernandez as its brand ambassadors. A model displays Rage merchandise. In fact, there’s an interesting story of how 54-year-old Akash Bansal, the Founder of Rage, got these actors to model for his brand when they were struggling to make a breakthrough in the film industry. But let’s leave the brand’s marketing strategy for later in the story. Sign up for our exclusive newsletters. Subscribe to check out our popular newsletters. The story behind how Akash Bansal built Rage from nothing to a garment business with a turnover of Rs 60 crore is an even more interesting one. Akash wanted to be a fashion designer but could not attend the prestigious Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, despite having cleared the exam as he did not have enough money to secure the admission. “I come from a humble background. My father was working with my uncle at his textile factory and he was unable to finance my higher education abroad,” Akash tells me. So he went back to his next love, which was electronics. After studying in Bangalore he joined BPL Sanyo. “But I had to return to Ludhiana six months later as my father wanted me to help him in his business,” Akash adds. Though he returned home, he was not satisfied with being just a cog in someone else’s business. “I could not work in that system. There were no proper processes in place and things were managed ad hoc,” he reflects, adding, “I told my dad I can't work in this system. There would be clashes. I told him I wanted to start something of my own.” But there was no capital that his father or his uncle could spare for him. Hustle is as hustle does Akash had heard about Stoll, the German-based global leader in flat knitting-machine technology. He decided to attend the year-long free workshop that the company offered at that time to train industry people who were the company’s potential clients to buy the machines. The Stoll machine - it cost upwards of Rs 50 lakh in 1990 - was yet to be imported to India. As the story of Akash’s life had been so far, he did not have the money to attend the year-long workshop. “I wrote to the company offering to be their India person and undergoing the training. The area manager who got back to me wondered why they should train me since they were not selling in India. ‘You cannot buy any machines from us,’ he told me,” says Akash, recalling the initial years of hustle and struggle. Knitwear samples on display at Rage factory in Ludhiana (Photo by author) “I told him, ‘if I get trained, the company will have a person in India and I will provide a free service to anyone for two years after you train me. So whenever you decide to sell your machines here, I will be available to you. You have to explore India as a market. It is a huge one’,” Akash adds. This was in 1993. The free training included free stay and food which worked out well for Akash. “Just imagine, out of Ludhiana, I now had access to the best of knitwear designers of the world right from people from top brands like Versace. I made friends with all of them,” Akash tells me. Today, hustle is what startup founders thrive on. But in those days, had it not been for Akash’s hustle, he would not have been able to set up Rage. Once his year-long training was over, Akash managed to get an extension of another year. This time to train on the hardware aspect of the machine. “What if the machine breaks down, I asked them. I should know how to repair it.” So, he got an extension of another year. “That was the most beautiful time of my stay in Germany. We brought the entire machine down from part to part and I learned how to build it up. Everything from scrap to electronics; I spent time in every department to learn the tricks of the machine,” he says. Now, wait for it. Akash managed a third-year extension. This time, it was to understand the customers’ woes and how the company resolved them. “So now I joined the service department. They had these huge vans that had all the servicing equipment. It was like an ambulance. We would get a call, say from a factory in Austria, where their machine was facing some error. And we would drive all the way there to fix it.” A knitwear machine does its magic at the Rage factory in Ludhiana. (Photo by author) Akash says he got the opportunity to visit the top factories of the world during that stint. “Those days, Germany, along with Italy, had the most knitting factories in the world. I went to factories that were making for Armanis, Versace, and other top brands. You have to see how the system there works. There was so much learning,” he adds. Tough start Finally, Akash came back to India. But not without a Stoll machine. He had made yet again another bargain with Stoll since he did not have money to buy it. “How do I sell the machines in India if I cannot demonstrate what it can do?” was his logic. “So, in one of our factories across the road there,” Akash says pointing in the direction of his uncle’s old factory, “we got the machine.” He was the first one to bring the computerised knitting machine to India. The year was 1995. “That machine is still there. And working. It has been 23 years. I have not sold that machine and I will never sell it,” he says fondly. There was no operator, there was no designer. The machine had to run for 24 hours a day. So even as he tried to keep it busy by knitting samples, he simultaneously started calling people from Monte Carlo to other brands to take a look at the machine. “People seemed uninterested. They were not willing to give me an appointment,” he tells me. By this time, Akash had also launched his own brand, Rage. The name has an interesting origin. “My dad had a little piece of land. I got a loan of around Rs 10 lakh from the bank to start things. My dad wanted the brand's name to be a four-letter word as my birth date is May 4. One day, he called me urgently to give him the name as he wanted to register it. I was at home and unable to come up with something immediately, I glanced at the novel by Will Wordsmith called ‘Rage’, which I was reading, and borrowed the name from there.” In 1995, Akash registered the company. Since he was not getting any positive response from people in Ludhiana to sell the machine, he made around 35 samples of women’s knitwear on his machine. He packed it all up in a suitcase and travelled to Delhi to try his luck. “In Delhi, I knocked on the door of all big brands. Nobody entertained me; nobody invited me inside,” he recalls. Akash was staying at a friend’s place in Delhi. At the end of the day when he was sharing his frustration, his friend’s sister suggested that she could introduce him to the owner of Ebony garments (popular with stocking trendy garments) as she was friends with his daughter. “DS Narula was the owner of Ebony and he gave me only five minutes. He took me to his office and said, ‘your time starts now’. In a hurry, I opened the suitcase and displayed all my 35 samples one by one to him. He didn’t utter a word. He looked at all of them, picked up his phone and told the receptionist not to disturb him for a couple of hours,” narrates Akash with a smile on his face. There was no stopping Akash then. He narrated his Germany experience to Narula and how he had been unsuccessful in getting anyone’s interest either in his products or the machine. “I said I can make 9,000 pieces in a year with one machine. Surprisingly, he said, ‘Okay, start. Send it to me. Don’t go anywhere else’. I said I needed some capital to process his order. He then gave me a cheque of Rs 2.5 lakh,” Akash says. A breakthrough This breakthrough was enough for Akash to throw himself in fulfilling the order. “I would run the machine myself, day in and day out. I would sleep there, going home only to take a shower.” Akash finally got someone whom he trained to run the machine in the night. Slowly, he employed other people, including a cutter and tailor. “We started with making 30 pieces a day. Washing would be done at home by my mother in our washing machine. I would then get them ironed from another person and get it packed.” Rage Knitwear jackets displayed at the Ludhiana factory. (Photo by author) It was the winter of 1995 and Akash finally sent around 5,500 pieces to Narula’s Ebony. “He calls me in January to his office and said that we had a sale of almost 100 percent. Only one piece was left unsold out of the 5,500 pieces!” As they say, fortune favours the brave Narula now wanted Akash to make more garments for his store. But he had only one machine. He bought the second machine with the funds provided by Narula. Word was spreading about Akash’s success with Ebony. He sold a few Stoll machines and as he had promised, Akash was around for two years to help the company sell in India. Akash started his journey with 5,000 pieces. In 2018, Rage did around half a million pieces, and now has around 100 machines, including two Stoll machines. “The kind of work we do is not basic, we are into quality wear and a lot of value addition goes into it; otherwise it would be easy to cross a million pieces,” he says. Around 1999, Akash requested his father to join him. “He let go of the partnership with his brother and he now looks after finance at Rage. I look after design and function,” Akash informs. One of the largest manufacturers for women knitwear in the country, Rage has a dedicated sales team across India. “We work for our own brand. We have never worked for any other brand. We do not export and have always catered to the domestic market,” says Akash. However, people from Canada, China, Brussels, and Belgium come here and take their stuff. The colourful thread spools waiting to be mounted on the machine at the Rage factory. (Photo by author) “We have an office in China since we source all our fabrics, yarn, and accessories from there. Ninety percent of yarn, accessories, and fabrics are from China.” Man with the golden touch Interestingly, Akash’s marketing strategy worked well not only for him but for the women who modelled his garments as well. He says, “In Bollywood, Rage is quite well known. They call me the man with the golden touch because whoever has modelled for us has become a superstar.” Mallika Sherawat was the first brand ambassador in 1995. “At that time, I had a budget of Rs 2 lakh for advertising. I had decided to spend five percent of my turnover on my branding every year. I saw Mallika Sherawat, then known as Rima Lamba, at a friend's place during a party. I offered her the modelling assignment and she agreed. I paid her Rs 5,000 and she shot for us. After two years, she got the movie Murder that made her famous. “In 1999, we took Priyanka Chopra as our model. She had become Miss India then. We had a marketing budget of Rs 5 lakh. By the time we hit the market with our ad, she had already become Miss World, and now you know where she is. We paid her Rs 50,000. I am sure she charges upwards of Rs 2 crore now.” “There's a joke in the industry that modelling for us is good for the careers of the actors,” he shares. While recounting his story, Akash says he is a strong believer that every soul has its own journey. A father of two boys, he believes that the only reason “our kids don't make a big name for themselves across the world is because we don’t set them free.” Akash should know. He made his own opportunities to soar after all.

Astitch in time saves nine, goes a popular adage. The dismantling of the quota system from January 2005, has probably given that much required stitch to a sector that was crumbling under excess capacities and unfavourable government policies. The Indian textile industry accounts for almost 14% of total industrial production and around 4% of the overall GDP of the country. For the four-month period ended April 2005, exports to the United States have moved up by 27% to touch $1.75 billion. The equity markets have noticed these potentials. This can be seen from the fact that since January, companies operating in this sector have seen a sudden surge in their share prices. Companies like Arvind mills and Century Textiles have shown price gains of 70.88% and 139.27% to trade at Rs 129.70 and Rs 314 respectively. Most of the top rung companies are traded at a P/E of 16 and analysts believe that there is still scope for re-rating many of these companies based on their future propects. Says R Rajgopal, vice president, IDBI Capital, "With the quota dismantling by the US, a new era has opened up for the textile industry in the developing world and for India in particular. Indian textile exports are expected to grow manifold in the years to come and the Indian textile industry is gearing itself for this explosive growth through requisite capex." On an average, stocks of mid-cap textile companies have gone up by almost 106% over the same period. SRF Ltd has turned out to be the top performing stock in this segment across sectors by clocking a gain of 655.34% to trade at Rs 293.45. Domestic growth driver India's gross domestic product (GDP) has increased by 6% and the per capita income has gone up by 5.2% to Rs 12,416 during 2004-05 as compared to Rs 11,799 in the previous year. With more than a billion population, the country accounts for a very low per capita consumption of textiles. India's per capita consumption is at 2.2 Kg, which is very low when compared to China's 5 Kg and Pakistan's 3 Kg. Analysts believe that the present per capita consumption in terms of length is expected to move up from 19 metres to 32 metres by the end of 2010. With the upper middle class crossing the 92 million mark by the end of 2006 and 153 million by the end of 2010, the per capita consumption for textiles is expected to move up. This, in turn, is expected to create demand for branded textile products. India is witnessing a considerable shift in the age and income profile of its population. The median age in the country is considered as 24 years against 36 in the USA and 30 years in China. The growing younger population with higher disposable income will tend to spend more in the years to come. Growing urbanization has evolved the need for retailing. Though the retail sector is at a nascent stage, much of the demand for branded textiles will be attributed to retailing in the coming years. Global demand scenario With the phasing out of the quota system, buyers across the world will have more power in selecting their source of material requirement. The global textile industry is estimated to be around $360 billion and together, both the US and Europe account for 64% of the total textile trade. Post-quota dismantling, the same figure is expected to be around $650 billion by the end of 2010. Indian textile companies command a leadership position and enjoy brand equity in supplying terry towels and bed linens to the US home textile markets. According to the latest data issued by the Office of Textile Export of America (OTEXA), textile exports to the US grew by 24.18% in January-June 2005 at 1169.28 million metres against 941.53 million metres in the first six months of the last year. Apparel exports went up by 32.31% at 413.75 million metres. Companies like Welspun India generate almost 82% of its revenue through exports and cater to retailers like Wal-Mart, Tommy Hilfiger and Shopco. India is one of the major suppliers for bath towels into the US market. Chinese checkers China and India have inherent advantages in the textile sector when compared to other countries on account of low costs of production. Though China offers lower costs, India is ahead in terms of skilled labour, fashion trends and designing. India's textile exports work out to $15 billion, constituting a 4% share of the global textile imports. This is still considered low when compared to China which accounts for a 17% market share in the global market. The share of China in USA's global imports of textiles and apparels has increased from 18.3% to 25.2%. Against this, India saw its share increase to 5.9% from the earlier share of 5.2% for the four month period ended April 2005. Given the strong presence of Indian textile companies in the entire value chain, Indian manufacturers are more competitive, post-quota. The market share of India in absolute terms is expected to touch $40 billion, which works out to a 7-8% share by the end of 2010. Now, the Indian textile industry is also riding high on the back of recent revaluation of the Chinese yuan. Says Sejal Doshi, analyst, Angel Broking, "The impact of the revaluation is going to be very little or at the most slightly positive." The Indian textile producers will become more competitive and players with pricing advantage would be able to increase their share in the global textile market. Companies will be in a better position to manage Chinese competition. Further, the closure of domestic capacities in the US is expected to create more space in the market. Global retailers India has the largest area under cotton cultivation throughout the world and ranks third in terms of crop production. Cotton textile comprises of cotton fibre, cotton yarn and fabrics made out of cotton yarn, where cotton yarn commands almost 70% of the spun yarn. The year 2003-04 saw a negative growth of 3.1% in cotton textiles. However, in the financial year 2004-05 it has shown a rise of 7.7%. In the year 2004-05, the export of cotton-based textile items consisting of cotton yarn, fabrics, made-ups and ready-made garments stood at $7.76 billion, whereas the exports of man-made textile items was at $ 2.557 billion. Further, the report shows that the cotton-spinning sector is doing well in India in comparison to synthetics which is facing a problem of increased raw material costs. The exports of cotton-based garments like home-made terry towels are expected to generate higher growth. As per McKinsey estimates, the global trade in home textiles is expected to grow from the current level of $8.6 bn to $23 bn by 2010. Post-dismantling of quotas, the scale of operation will play a crucial role in attracting global retailers. These retailers will be selective in terms of their requirement and the country. Larger and integrated players would have the advantage in terms of pricing, volume, quality and delivery. Looking at the domestic and global demand scenario, Indian textile companies are gearing up to meet the global and domestic demand. Companies are building more capacities to increase the current production levels. Companies like Welspun India have invested in new capacities recently. Says Shailesh Dhamkar, analyst, SBI Capital, "Growth is sustainable on the back of demand in the global as well as domestic market. In the long run, players with stable and innovative products having global level capacities will survive, which in turn will result in some kind of consolidation in the years to come." However, the growth of the Indian textile industry will be concerned over the issues of global outsourcing, volatile cotton prices and currency fluctuations. One of the biggest threats that analysts believe Indian textiles will face is that of China emerging as one of the major competitors. Corporate initiatives Following the quota phase-out, the textile market has seen a spurt of activities all across the industry. The sector analysis of Q1 results reveals that the textile industry is amongst one of the best performers after the hotels, paper and construction sectors. The current size of the Indian textile industry is $36 billion and is expected to grow by 18.75% CARG to touch $85 billion by the end of 2010. Out of the total estimated increase, the domestic market share would be around $45 billion and export will account for $40 billion. About 60% of exports will be attributed to garments. In order to keep up with this increased demand, various government schemes have also recently seen a steep rise in the funds allocated to them. There is an increase of 85% in the funds allocated to the Technology Upgradation Fund Scheme (TUFS) in 2004-05 over the average amount of 1999-2004. Likewise APE, TCIDS, CTM have seen hikes of 216%, 88% and 52% respectively. With the rationalisation of the excise duty textile structure, there are chances of more growth in the synthetic sector. For 2005-06, excise duties have been reduced from 24% to 16% on PF yarn, partially oriented yarn and polyester textures yarn. To avail the potential of the textile industry, around 25 companies have come up with total investment plans of over Rs 8,500 crore in greenfield and capex ventures. With hardly any industry bottlenecks like excess capacity and liquidity crunch because of high gearing, the textile industry can finally start spinning a yarn. No pun intended.

Keraniganj garment village, as it has come to be known, is now the most sought-after place for apparel business in the country, accounting for about 90% share of the readymade garments in the local market. It is now a bustling business hub, with loans pouring into the area and 8,000 apparel manufacturing units of 4,000 small and medium entrepreneurs employing around 200,000 people. In 2016, with eight years’ work experience in the readymade garments industry as a swing machine operator, a young man established a small garments manufacturing unit in Keraniganj with five swing machines at a cost of Tk1 lakh. From the start, with cloths and other material collected from various sources, he has been manufacturing different types of garment products such as pants, jackets, blazers, among others, of his own design in his garment factory and supplying them to the local markets. After three years, his capital has now swelled to Tk50 lakh and number of swing machines to 25. This is the story of a successful entrepreneur, Md Rubel Islam, who now owns two small garment factories and two outlets for selling the manufactured products in Awal Tower, which houses one of the numerous markets in Keraniganj garment village. “My business is expanding day by day, and I am happy with the progress,” says Rubel Islam. “I am happy that I have been able to create employment opportunity for 25 people who now work in my factories,” he further says, while adding that he pays his workers a handsome amount for their work. But his journey to his present state was not so easy for Rubel. He says the skills he acquired in apparel manufacturing process during the eight years of working in apparel sector helped him to grow. Same as those two of Rubel’s, Keraniganj garment village now has 8,000 apparel manufacturing units of 4,000 small and medium entrepreneurs, according to Keraniganj Garments Traders and Shop Owners' Cooperative Association. The Association’s Treasurer Sheikh Kawsar says that with the expansion of business in the hub, the number of entrepreneurs in apparel manufacturing has been on the rise over a considerable period of time. With 10-20% annual growth on an average, some are making more than the others with their innovative ideas and quality products, he mentions. “Once, the garment hub was popular only for wholesale. Traders used to sell, import, or collect the readymade garment products from different sources,” he recalls, adding that after 2000, a number of traders, realizing the rising demand for the readymade garment products, started to manufacture readymade garment themselves. On the other hand, entrepreneurs with no selling outlets also came forward to become readymade garment manufacturers rather than sellers. Kawsar goes to add that the production of readymade garments (for selling in the domestic markets) in ‘Keraniganj garment village’ thrived after 2008 and presently about 90% of readymade garments in the local markets are being supplied from markets in Keraniganj. “Retailers from across the country are their customers,” he says. The hub is getting more and more popular among the garment manufacturers with each passing day, as the garment manufacturers can make quality apparels at a cost that allows them to sell their products at competitive prices, he concludes. According to the association, the garment hub has now about 250 markets that house around 8,000 small readymade garments manufacturing units and 6,000 outlets for selling the manufactured readymade garment product. Some 200,000 people are working in these factories and outlets. Visiting the area, Dhaka Tribune has found the hub quite different from other wholesale markets in the country. Each of the 250 markets in this garment hub is a five or six-storey building. Ground and first floors of each of these markets are outlets for wholesale of readymade garments, while the remaining (upper) floors are factories. Various readymade garment items including shirts, pants, t-shirts, panjabees, tops, frocks, gowns, three-pieces, trousers, blazers and winter clothing are being sold at the outlets; of these, about 85% are made in factories located inside the garment village, while some 15% are imported products, especially from India, Thailand and China. Garment manufacturers have said about how they collect cloth and other materials such as yarns, fabrics, chains, stickers, and buttons from importers or local suppliers; and manufacture the readymade garments, either with their brand name or client’s brand name on the product. Majority of the garment accessories they use come from China, India, Korea, and Taiwan. Sirajul Islam, owner of two garment factories with 15 sewing machines, says that he produces pants and winter clothing, his target customers being people from the middle and lower-middle income group. “We make products with a 40% value addition, and our profit range is 10-15%,” he adds. Some 100 pieces of pants and 100 pieces of sweaters are being manufactured in Sirajul’s two factories on a daily basis. Daily sales worth Tk50 crore on average Though collective data of daily turnover at the garment hub is not available, traders and bankers stationed at the hub report that readymade garments worth Tk50 crore are being sold from the wholesale markets every day on an average. According to the Keraniganj Garments Traders and Shop Owners' Cooperative Association, the sales usually shoot up before Eid and winter. The association mentions that the garment hub sells apparel products worth about Tk5,000 crore during Eid season and products worth Tk1, 000 crore during winter season; in winter season, the daily turnover crosses about Tk60 crore, and before Eid-ul-Fitr, it crosses TK200 crore on a daily basis. Tk500 crore SME loan into the hub Realizing the future potentials of the garments hub, 30 banks and other non-banking financial institutions including Brac, Dutch Bangla, AB, City, Uttara, and IDLC have opened branches in the area. “Banks are setting up their branches in the hub, as there are huge business potentials in this area, especially in SME sector,” Abdul Wahed, Uttara branch manager inside the hub, has said. His bank set up the branch two years ago, the branch’s annual disbursements of loan in the area being to the tune of Tk7-8 crore. The average annual disbursements of SME loans to the businesses inside the hub by the 30 banks and non-banking financial institutions have already reached Tk500 crore, Wahed informs. Mahfuzul Islam, credit manager at the City bank’s SME unit in Keraniganj, says that the rate of loan recovery has, so far, been spectacular and the loans were rarely defaulted.