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Tales from the Development Frontier
Sialkot Sporting Goods Cluster, Punjab Province, Pakistan The best thing the local government did was to let us grow and not interfere. —Interview with the chairman, Sialkot Chamber of Commerce
The sporting goods cluster in the city of Sialkot and adjoining rural areas is a tale of success in the development of light manufacturing in Pakistan. Sialkot is 130 kilometers northwest of Lahore, the provincial capital, and has about 800,000 people. The city produces sporting goods, surgical instruments, and leather goods of high quality and world renown and has the highest export earnings per capita of any Pakistani city. After Karachi, it is Pakistan’s largest export center, annually shipping goods worth more than $500 million, mostly to North America and Western Europe (figure 8.2). Sialkot is one of the light industrial hubs in Pakistan, producing about 99 percent of all exported sporting goods. On average, more than 40 million soccer balls, worth $210 million, are produced annually by some 60,000 highly skilled workers. The city produces as many as 60 million hand-stitched soccer balls in a World Cup year.2 By some estimates, Sialkot produced close to 90 percent of the world’s soccer balls in 1990–2010. Among the city’s nonleather products, stainless steel surgical instruments account for 20 percent of total trade. Foreign producers have formed collaborative production arrangements with Pakistani Figure 8.2 Exports of Sialkot, Pakistan, 1990–2010 800
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Source: Interviews at the Sialkot Chamber of Commerce, 2010.
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