The Sialkot Football Sector

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Among the high end professional football producers, a few major players (formal organizations) are:

- Forward Sports Pvt. Ltd

- SilverStar Sports

- Sublime Sports Ltd

- Anwar Khawaja Industries Ltd

- Capital Sports Ltd

The main customers of these companies include top brands such as Nike, Puma, Adidas, Select Sports and various football leagues located in UK, Europe and USA. Almost 99% of the production of these companies is exported to various parts of the world. These producers are responsible for the entire production process starting from the purchase of raw material to packaging except the stitching of footballs. Some of these producers have established small hand stitches and machine stitched units but a majority of the production is outsourced to the registered stitching units. However, some producers have established the latest technology of thermally bonded football production within their premises though only a very minimal number of footballs are currently being produced using this latest technology.

Usually these companies have agreements with one or two top brands and deals of exclusivity are signed from the buyer’s side to produce for that specific brand only. For instance, in 2014 Forward Sports was given the contract of producing the ‘Brazuca’ for the FIFA World Cup. Although the same ball was being manufactured in China as well but Forward Sports was to exclusively produce for Adidas as per the contract. Moreover, Anwar Khawaja Industries (AKI) has an exclusive contract with Select Sports since its inception. This contract of exclusivity is a mutual consent between both the parties, in which AKI cannot produce for any other company nor can Select Sports buy from any other manufacturer around the globe.

These kinds of contracts provide a competitive edge to the Sialkot football industry from other competing players located in China, India, Bangladesh and Thailand since they provide security for their intellectual properties.

LATEST OPERATIONAL TRENDS

Recently, football manufacturers in Pakistan have adopted thermally bonded technology for football production. It was first introduced by Forward Sports in the production of Brazuca, the football produced for Adidas which as used in the FIFA 2014 World Cup. However, currently all the major industries players mentioned above have either adopted the latest technology or are in the process of embracing the latest cost effective production methods for footballs. Other than production methods, the football manufacturers are also adopting latest software for inventory management and report generation for internal purposes. An example of this was seen in Anwar Khawaja Industries. It is currently in the process of implementing SAP as the enterprise resource planning software.

References:

Atkin, David, Azam Chaudhry, Shamyla Chaudry, Amit Khandelwal, and Eric Verhoogen. "Organizational Barriers to Technology Adoption: Evidence from Soccer-Ball Producers in Pakistan." (2015): n. pag. Web.

Atkin, David, Azam Chaudhry, Shamyla Chaudry, Amit K. Khandelwal, and Tariq Raza And. "David Atkin." On the Origins and Development of Pakistan's Soccer-Ball Cluster. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Dec. 2016.

Ghani, Faraz. "Story of The Football." Al Jazeera.

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