An office textile factory in the area is expected to close and its 150 employees will be laid off. In 2017 it was sold by Eliezer Fishman’s receiver to a group of investors led by Avner Shaham
In recent days, the company’s management convened the employees of its activity site in the region and reported to them the expected moves, in view of a sharp drop in orders from anchor customers in the US and France, due to the rising cost of production inputs and the expanding import of textile products from China and the Far East. , and they say all the time. Every month hundreds of thousands of shekels are spent on property tax, fuel oil, electricity and water. This, without any help or consideration from the state, while our competitors from Turkey and other countries benefit from the fact that the states subsidize expenses,” the company’s CEO Ronit Tsitat-Kashi told Calcalist.
Office Textile manufactures bedding and bedding and addresses the home textile market. Office Textile used to be a public company and it stopped trading on the stock exchange in 2010. A veteran of the textile industry in Israel says that over the years it was a profitable company, and paid its owners dividends amounting to several tens of millions of shekels a year. “This is another nail in the coffin of the Israeli textile industry, or what is left of it,” he said.
In the same year, the Reality Fund purchased the company’s land in the area for approximately NIS 105 million. In recent months, the Tel Aviv District Planning and Construction Committee began to discuss the plan for the development of the area, while changing the designation of the land for residences and the construction of 730 housing units, commercial spaces, and more. These plans were developed regardless of the condition of Textile Office.
According to CEO Citat-Kashi, “Nothing happens like that all of a sudden. We have been in a crawling process for years, and we have reached the end. The state lowered the protective tariffs on fabrics imported from the Far East, and we adapted ourselves in a way that allowed us to differentiate ourselves from imported products through the good quality, we maintained the relative advantage in the market while improving performance and improving the products, and at the same time cotton prices jumped significantly, as did the other production inputs.”
She says that only about a year ago, Office Textile’s management implemented a new production machine in a factory in the area in order to improve competitiveness in the markets. This, alongside the expansion of its retail chain The Bedlinen Factory, which currently includes 20 stores, one of which was opened last March in the Dizingoff Center in Tel Aviv: “In the past year we opened six new stores and intended to open more – hoping that retail will put us on our feet while the situation in the markets is difficult and while the government’s moves They only strengthened the importers at our expense.”
At Office Textile they say that along with continuing to face the tough competition with cheap imports and the increase in production inputs, the rising inflation in the US has subdued it and led to a sharp drop in orders. Thus, one of the company’s anchor customers, who used to purchase from it to the extent of several million dollars a year, has reduced during the year The last one is orders. Quote-Kashi: “We have already purchased fabrics for these customers in large quantities, we were planning to purchase a new machine with a width that is suitable for digital printing on bedding of different sizes so that we can receive unique orders, but that probably won’t happen. I still hope that a miracle will happen to us, that a significant client will come and change the picture.”