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What went wrongAn attar factory owner in Barlekha, Maulvibazar, in a Business Standard Bangla report

Flights stopped, and a two-crore export year turned into a one-crore loss

This agar-attar factory in Sujanagar, Barlekha, exports about 2 crore taka of product in a normal year. With Middle East flights grounded in Covid, 2020 ended with a loss of roughly 1 crore taka.

Sujanagar in Barlekha upazila, Maulvibazar, is the centre of the country's agar-attar trade, and this factory's entire market is the Middle East. In a normal year it exports about 2 crore taka of attar. When international flights were suspended during Covid there was simply no way to ship, and the owner put his loss for that year at roughly 1 crore taka. Because the product has almost no home market, there was nowhere else to sell and recover part of it. The pressure was still on when the report was written in 2021, with other owners in the village sitting on unsold stock of their own. Neither the original capital nor the year the factory started is stated.

Lessons

  1. 1.When the whole market is export to one region, sales go to zero the day the planes stop, and with no home market there is nothing to fall back on
  2. 2.Attar keeps, but stock sitting in a godown is capital sitting idle: one blocked shipping year breaks the next year's accounts too

Published with the person's permission, without revealing who they are.

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