Modernising sports goods industry: Smeda plans to set up product development centre

The Small and Medium Enterprise Development Authority (Smeda) has evolved a strategy for tracking sports goods industry on modern and scientific lines. The Smeda has adopted this approach in close consultation with all the stakeholders. The concept of this programme is to enable the sports goods sector to deal with emerging technology and produce high value added products.
Official sources told Business Recorder here on Sunday that the step was being taken for ensuring the entry of sports goods industry into largest segment of sports goods exports. Presently 55 percent of the sports goods are composite based.
In this regard Smeda has prepared a well-knitted plan for setting up a product development centre for composite in Sialkot at a cost of Rs 443.4250 million and development work on this project would be undertaken shortly.
Regular functioning of the product development centre would extend services like product testing (physical and chemical), provide skilled workforce to the sector, enhance productivity by providing technical support services to new and existing industrial units, help develop imported machinery locally through reverse engineering and facilitate in increasing exports of composite based sports goods.
The globally Sialkot is identified as a producer of quality products in sports goods, surgical instruments, leather garments, gloves & accessories, sportswear and musical instruments. Around 200,000 plus people are engaged directly or indirectly with export activities and annual export earnings of the city hover around 900 million dollars of which the share of sports goods sector is 350 million dollars per annum.
In sports goods industry where new materials had supplanted the old includes tennis, archery, skiing, boating, golf and fishing. The composites had replaced previous materials and eventually declined in price to widely affordable level. In the production of tennis rackets the wood was only material for frames had totally been changed into new high performance materials.
The trend of tubular steel and aluminium rackets took place in 1970s and these were lighter than wood-made tennis rackets as well as unaffected by the weather.
But within next six years composite rackets became available and wood virtually disappeared and at present 95 percent of all tennis rackets are being produced with composite materials. The other sports goods equipment like field, roller and ice hockey sticks and ice skates, golf clubs, fishing rods and tackles base bats and billiard cues have been converted into composite materials.
The proposed product development centre will prepare the local industry to aggressively enter into the international market of composite based sports items. The sports sector already enjoying strong linkages with international sports goods brands, which would help in marketing of Pakistan made products and help in regaining its position in the global market.
The centre will provide technical know-how, trained labour force, testing facilities, prototype development and mold making services to the sports goods sector as well as it will act as for diversification into composite based products like auto parts, home appliances and surgical instruments etc, the sources added.
It may be mentioned that the sports goods was declared as priority sector in 2004 by the federal Ministry of Industries, Production & Special Initiatives in 2004 and Smeda was given this task of developing a coherent strategy for its development.