Knitwear
8. Women's wool and synthetic knitwear was put under restraint last summer at 1.675,000 pieces. Men's wool knitwear was put under E.A. surveillance at the same time. In February this year men's wool knitwear was combined with the women's knitwear quota and the total increased to 2,238,000 pieces. The Swedes now want to reduce the quota to 1,981,000 pieces after excluding imports of 18,000 women's continuous synthetic knitwear, which would be released from control. This would men a reduction of nearly 10 per cent in the quota. Men's discontinuous knitwear would also be subject to E.A... Industries 1 have throughout maintained that there was no evidence that ports from Hong Kong had caused inquiry to any section of the domestic industry.
9.
Swedish production and imports of knitwear have been as follows:
1965
1966
1967
1968
Production
Imports
Exports
Consumption
4,547
4,202
4,150
3.479
7.470
9.321
10,170
8,694
315
458
556
464
11,702
13,085
13,764
11,709
and imports were broken down as follows:
S. Korea
2,549
5,088
4,745
2,714
Hong Kong
•
1,741
1,393
2,077
2,595
Italy
1,676
1,365
1,129
947
U.K.
257
247
304
354
Portugal
1
20
134
161
and it is of interest that there was a further reduction in imports from 1.53 million pieces in the first two months of 1968 to 1.40 million in the corresponding period of this year, but within the total the Portugese figure rose from 10,000 to 47,000, Hong Kong fell from 466,000 to 408,000 and S. Korea fell from 586,000 to 488,000.
10. It will be seen from the foregoing that the big increase in imports was between 1965 and 1966 and that this had very little effect on overall production: and that when production fell by 671,000 pieces in 1968, importa also fell by - 1,476,000 pieces. The fall in imports was a result of the imposition of restric-
tions on imports from South Korea and the fall would have been greater if Hong Kong had not expanded her exports to fill part of the vacuum which had thus been created. The Swedes were demonstrably unable to fill any of the other part. The new arrival on the scene is Portugal, whose trade was running at an annual rate of 280,000 pieces in the first two months of this year. The Portuguese send a lot of m.m.f. knitwear to this country.
11.
The Swedish difficulties have in part been of their own making: a failure to move into synthetics as quickly as the asiatic producers using cheap Japanese acrylic fibre. Imports of wool knitwear have risen, but the correlation between the increase in imports and the decline in production is weak:.
Production
Imports
Exports
Consumption
1965
1,115
1966
1967
1968
989
778
433
2,340
2,179
2,654
2,838
169
3,287
144
164
131
3,024
3,268 verwed
3,140
the implication being that consumption would not have in 1967 renewed if a supply of cheap imports had not been available. The additional imports all came from Hong Kong. The U.K. share of the trade remained nerally unaltered at 251,000 pieces in 1968. This very strongly suggests that imports of wool knitwear from Hong Kong have not caused inquiry to the domestic industry. The Swedes are in a stronger position to compete with Hong Kông in their home market
/than we
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