Pakistan’s knitwear and hosiery exporters are warning that trade policy abroad is moving faster than industrial policy at home. They want Islamabad to treat it as a crisis—because once preference margins disappear, they rarely return.
The Pakistan Hosiery Manufacturers and Exporters Association (PHMA) has asked the prime minister to declare an export emergency and call an urgent consultative meeting. PHMA says it represents 1,200+ exporting units and that hosiery/knitwear contributes roughly $6bn a year in exports.
Their trigger is a two-front shock: (1) the proposed EU–India FTA, which would narrow or eliminate Pakistan’s tariff advantage in Europe, and (2) the US–India deal that cuts tariffs on Indian goods from 50% to 18%—a shift export markets immediately price in.
Pakistan currently benefits from EU GSP+: zero duties on much of its exports, conditional on implementing 27 international conventions. PHMA argues that if India achieves similar tariff outcomes without comparable compliance obligations, “parity” becomes a structural disadvantage—especially with Pakistan’s “historically high” production costs.
The policy task is implicitly industrial: cut the cost base (energy, finance, refunds/liquidity) faster than preference margins shrink. Otherwise, the sector’s problem shifts from marketing to mathematics—and orders will follow the lower landed cost.
