Pakistan Ball Maker to Fulfill WORLD CUP Dream

[Abu Zolfiqar]

SIALKOT: It was when he felt the roar of the crowd at the 2006 World Cup in Germany that Pakistani factory owner Khawaja Akhtar first dreamt up a goal of his own: to manufacture the ball for the biggest soccer tournament on the planet.

“The people were chanting all around me. I just thought, 'This is the real thing',” Akhtar told Reuters. “I was part of the crowd. I never had that kind of feeling before.”

His factory in eastern Pakistan had made balls for the German Bundesliga, French league and Champions League, but he had never snagged a World Cup contract.

Last year he finally got his chance - but only 33 days to make it happen.

When Akhtar heard last autumn that Adidas' Chinese supplier for the World Cup couldn't keep up with demand, he immediately invited executives to his plant in Sialkot, a wealthy Pakistani manufacturing town with a long history of leatherwork.

Their first visit was not a success.

“They said 'You have Stone Age equipment,” said his oldest son, Hassan Masood Khawaja, laughing.

“After they left, my father called a meeting and said: 'This is our only chance. If we show them we can't do it, we'll never get another chance again.'”

It usually takes six months to set up a production line, but the factory only had a month - Adidas, the German sports equipment maker, was in a hurry. So Khawaja designed, made and moved the equipment into place within 33 days. Everything had to be done from scratch.

“It was hard, maybe the hardest thing I've ever done,” he said over the noise of the hot, hissing machines.

But it was a success, and the firm's previous investment in thermal bonding technology paid off. Only thermally bonded balls - made using a glue that reacts with heat - are round enough for the World Cup's strict standards.

A leading force in world cricket, Pakistan is a mere also-ran in soccer, where it ranks just 159th in the world.

But Akhtar's factory, where men and women in bright, flowing robes move plastic ball panels from machine to precision machine, is part of a long tradition of Sialkot football makers.

Local legend tells of a poor cobbler who made his fortune by repairing the punctured footballs of colonial-era British soldiers, then studying how to make them himself.

He was so successful that soldiers all over the region started buying from him. Business blossomed - but so did child labour.

A series of scandals, and changing technology, forced many factories to close. Others had to clean up their acts.

These days’ foreign brands frequently inspect Sialkot factories that make their footballs.

Large signs on Akhtar's factory walls sternly proclaim that child labour is forbidden and unions are allowed.

Workers that Reuters spoke to privately confirmed that conditions were good - the salary was mostly minimum wage, around $100 a month, but social security, life insurance and transport were extra benefits.

A small government hospital sits on the premises.

In the past 40 years, Akhtar's own family business, called Forward, has grown from 50 men to 1,400 employees. Unusually for Pakistan, nearly a quarter of them are women.

Some wear the niqab, a long black covering that leaves only a pair of brown eyes exposed. Others flaunt bright sandals with imitation jewels and wear robes the colour of tropical birds.

Almost all say they are the first woman in their family to work.

Shakila Ashrafi, a 38-year-old mother whose long beige coat reached down to her ankles, said one of her first purchases was a television.

When the World Cup kicks off in Brazil on June 12, they plan to invite their neighbours - all avid cricket supporters - to come and watch the strange foreign game being played half a world away.

“We will bring everyone together to see the match,” she said, her busy hands pausing for a moment. “I want them to see what we make and where the balls go.”

 

[Muhammad Omar]

 

[Kompromat]

Zindabad akistan:

 

[Secret Service]

so they are making thermal bonding synthetic footballs ...great

 

[hussain0216]

Does that mean the world cup final will be played with a Pakistani ball

 

[Musalman]

Does that mean the world cup final will be played with a Pakistani ball

Ouch !!!

 

[punit]

 

[HttpError]

You can't keep us out of World Stage, we will find a way to sneak in everywhere

 

[Abu Zolfiqar]

You can't keep us out of World Stage, we will find a way to sneak in everywhere

wouldnt be the first time...nor the last GOD willling

 

[Dubious]

Awesome story!!

This was a piece of similar news in 2010 :

Globalization in Pakistan: The Football Stitchers of Sialkot
By Hasnain Kazim in Sialkot, Pakistan

The city of Sialkot in Pakistan produces as many as 60 million hand-stitched footballs in a World Cup year. The firms here are running out of new workers since child labor was abolished. Western buyers may have a clear conscience, but the children of Sialkot now toil in the local brickworks instead.

The village is surrounded by lush green fields. A few red chimneys from brick factories, their tips blackened with soot, jut into the sky. Flat, crumbling buildings are dotted around with windows like arrow slots. They appear to be barns or grain stores.

In one of these houses in Sambrial, a few kilometers outside Sialkot on Pakistan's border with India, Shaukat is sitting on a short-legged chair next to 20 other men. He has taken off his sandals and put them next to his chair. In March, it's warm enough to work barefoot. Shaukat is a strong, 20-year-old man. He has been working for this independent stitching factory, Danayal, for eight years. Danayal produces handmade footballs for professional leagues.
At one end of the room there's an old television set showing a football match, but the men aren't paying any attention to it. They're sewing and talking to each other. They find cricket far more interesting. Most of them have never played football. But Shaukat is glad that millions of people around the world like football -- maybe not in Pakistan and not really in the entire region of South Asia, but in the rest of the world. That global love of the beautiful game has given him an income for years.

At the entrance to the factory there's a notice board showing the current rates of pay. Depending on the model, his employer pays between 55 and 63 Pakistan rupees per ball ($0.65 to $0.75, €0.48 to €0.55). "On a good day I manage six balls," says Shaukat. That's eight hours work. "That's not a lot of money," he says as he pushes a needle through the thick synthetic leather and stitches together two patches. His boss is standing close by so he quickly adds: "But it's not little either." He gets paid every Saturday and has to feed a family of six with his wages.

Beneficiaries of Globalization

On average the people of Sialkot earn €1,000 euros ($1,370) a year, twice the national average, thanks to the sports goods industry. Manufacturers of surgical instruments, leather goods and musical instruments also contribute to the city's prosperity. All balls and surgical knives manufactured here are exported. Politicians and executives scrutinized foreign markets and adopted the standards of their Western partners. Some 500,000 people live here -- 3 million if you include the commuter belt -- and most of them are proud of themselves and their city. The streets are better and the cars newer than in other regions of Pakistan. Sialkot has profited from globalization.

There's a hill of white footballs piled up in the room next door. The material -- per ball, 20 hexagonal patches and 12 pentagons of synthetical leather plus the bladder and thread -- is supplied by the company Forward Sports. Every evening a truck comes to collect the finished balls. At present, Forward Sports is the biggest manufacturer of handmade footballs in Sialkot. It outsources to more than 100 stitching centers like Danayal. It sells the balls to German sports company Adidas for between €5 and €10 per ball, no one here wants to state the exact price. Adidas has supply contracts with other companies in Sialkot in addition to Forward Sports.

It's a long route from the stitching rooms of Sialkot to the professional football pitches of Europe and America. First you get the sub-subcontractors -- the stitching centers, the backroom workshops, the one-man businesses. Add to that the subcontractors, the transport firms, the customs offices, the sports equipment giants, the advertising industry, the sports good retailers and the department stores. The chain converts a 63-rupee ball into a product costing more than €100. Everyone wants a cut. And someone has to come up with the millions of euros for the football stars, the expensive advertising icons of the sports brands.

Up to 60 Million Footballs a Year

Demand for footballs is enormous, especially in years when there's a World Cup. Since the mid-1980s, Sialkot has had its own customs office, which means the manufacturers don't have to transport their goods to the port of Karachi. They call the freight center their "dry port." Last year the city opened a modern airport to allow the gentlemen from Adidas, Nike, Puma and Co to fly straight to Sialkot and to receive particularly urgently needed supplies per air freight.
Recently, however, hardly any Western executives have dared to travel to Pakistan, even though there haven't been any terrorist attacks in Sialkot. The sports giants are so afraid of terrorism that they haven't even built up a distribution network in the country, even though most of their products are manufactured here. Pakistani business people have trouble getting visas for the United States or for Europe. But business is still going well, they say.

The factories of Sialkot supply 40 million footballs a year, and that number rises to 60 million in European Championship or World Cup years. That's an estimated 70 percent of the global production of hand-sewed footballs. According to legend, the success story of Sialkot as world capital of football production started with a man who repaired a leather ball for British colonial military officers about a century ago, and then began making his own balls. He was called Syed Sahib, and the city has named a street after him.

The Pakistani suppliers have had a good reputation among global sports firms ever since child labor was officially banned here. Children as young as 10 years old used to stitch footballs until there was an international outcry about it. The sports companies, accustomed to nurturing their image with huge sums of money, got worried about their reputation. So they sided with human rights campaigners and exerted pressure. In 1997, Pakistani suppliers and representatives of Unicef and the International Labor Organization signed the Atlanta Agreement in which the industry agreed to stop the use of child labor.

Thousands of children lost their jobs overnight. To make it easier for the sports groups to control the ban, the big domestic manufacturers prohibited people from working at home and built stitching centers instead. Pakistan now has the Independent Monitoring Association for Child Labor (IMAC), which regularly visits factories and checks the workers' papers. In order to preclude bribery, a computer determines at random the time and location of factory inspections. It's odd that IMAC is financed by local manufacturers. But several small firms don't take part in the system. "It could well be that they are still employing children," says one IMAC controller.

"Child labor is a sensitive issue," says Aziz-ur Rehman, the head of Adidas in Pakistan. He says Adidas has developed its own monitoring system. In addition, its subcontractor Forward Sports sends people into the stitching factories to make sure there are no children there.

The case of Saga Sports is a cautionary tale of what can happen when a child is caught stitching footballs these days. Nike cancelled its contract with the company in 2006 because of it and Saga, once one of the city's biggest employers, is virtually bankrupt today. The managers of Forward Sports, Comet Sports, Capital Sports and the smaller manufacturers in the city paid close attention to the fate of their competitor.

Children Now Work in Brickworks Instead

Parents now send their children to the brickworks and into metalworking companies where no one is worried about corporate image. The families need the money to survive. The local sports companies are aware of what's happened but they want to fulfil the wishes of their Western customers. After all, the people who spend a lot of money on footballs want to do so with a clear conscience. The customer in a sports retail outlet doesn't realize that young girls are now hauling bricks right next door to Danayal, the stitching factory.

"Ten or 12-year-olds were well off here," says one manager who asked not to be named. "They learned a trade here that secured them an income for life. Now we're having trouble finding new stitchers."

Muhammad Ishaq Butt is convinced that Sialkot will cope with the labor shortage. He's sitting in his wood-panelled office in the city center wearing a blue blazer with gold buttons, a closely cropped grey beard and horn-rimmed spectacles. Butt, president of the Sialkot Chamber of Commerce, looks like a Hanseatic entrepreneur. "We're currently building a factory where balls will be glued by machine," he says. It's a joint venture project between the city and private investors. In Thailand and China balls have for a long time been exclusively produced by machine -- to such a high standard that the 2006 World Cup in Germany for the first time didn't use a football made in Pakistan, but in Thailand. The Adidas model "Jabulani" for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa is manufactured in China.

Ball From Pakistan in Champions League Final

A lot is going to change for the stitchers of Sialkot in future. "That's how society works," says Butt. "The people will learn to operate machines." However, demand for hand-stitched balls remains very high and the quality is still better than balls glued or stitched by machines, he adds.

In the big companies of Sialkot, men in white coats are working to make the handmade balls even better. They're using computers to measure whether the product is perfectly round. Machines check how much water a ball absorbs in the rain, how resilient the material is and whether the surface is too slippery. The work is paying off, the researchers say. A ball made in Sialkot will be used in the Champions League final in Madrid on May 22.

So no one in Sialkot should be worried, says Butt.

Besides, firms here have learned how to offset market share lost to the competition in the Far East, he adds. "We're increasingly making other products here." Sports clothing and bags, for example. And he proudly declares that his city has made it to the top in other industry: The city now produces more gloves than any other region in the world.



Globalization in Pakistan: The Football Stitchers of Sialkot - SPIEGEL ONLINE

Sialkot is a living example of what Pakistan can do and contribute!

 

[Pakistanisage]

Pakistan is proud of its Sialkot Citizens and their Industry.

 

[Zarvan]

so this is the design of football

 

[Abu Zolfiqar]

so this is the design of football

not necessarily....there are tens of thousands of designs

Pakistan is proud of its Sialkot Citizens and their Industry.

they work hard!

hard work pays dividends

 

[Zarvan]

not necessarily....there are tens of thousands of designs



they work hard!

hard work pays dividends

I think this was the design for world cup which not this company producing

 

[Abu Zolfiqar]

some followup for you

More than 3,000 “Brazuca” balls will be used at the monthlong tournament starting June 12. That compares with millions of Adidas and other brands of ball produced annually by factories such as Forward Sports (Pvt) Ltd. in Sialkot, Pakistan’s main sports manufacturing center. Businesses there say they’ve seen a resurgence of demand amid faster economic growth and as wages have become more competitive with China. Child labor, which had led foreign companies to leave the country, has been clamped down on.

That’s reflected in a sign at the Forward Sports factory gate where workers wait in line at 8 a.m. to show their employee card. “We don’t employ people under 15,” it reads. Another sign says not to drop litter, while an open sewer flows on one side of the gate. Many of the workers are on a minimum monthly wage of 10,000 rupees ($102), less than the price of a top-line Brazuca ball in the U.K. or U.S.

‘Cheap Labor’

“Now that China’s standard of living is going up day by day, their labor wage is going up day by day,” said Mohammad Younus Sony, head of the Pakistan Sports Goods Manufacturers & Exporters Association, in an interview in Sialkot. “We will have one less competitor. We have a lot of cheap labor, our products are good in price.”

Maradona, Argentina’s 1986 World Cup-winning captain, recently disparaged Pakistan’s footballing credentials, saying Argentine soccer chiefs knew even less about the sport than the people of the south Asian country. “I’m sure people in Pakistan are good at a lot of things, but I never saw Pakistan play in the World Cup finals,” he said.

He was right about the nation’s tournament record -- or lack of one -- and also that it has other skills. That’s shown by Pakistan’s return to supplying top-quality World Cup balls after a gap of more than 10 years.

Stitching Patches

At Forward Sports, there’s a din of machinery as about 1,800 workers on dozens of assembly lines make balls in various colors, sewing patches of synthetic material together and flipping the ball inside out as stitching is done from the inner side. The ball is filled with air, inspected and put in a circular shaped machine that improves roundness. Some workers use sewing machines while others do it the old-fashioned way, stitching patches together using two needles. The workforce includes women wearing the traditional Pakistani long tunic and baggy pants, some displaying nail polish, and others with burqas showing just the face. Typically, employees work eight hours a day for six days a week.

Forward Sports, the country’s biggest manufacturer of match balls for Adidas, makes hand-stitched, machine-made and thermo-bonded footballs for the world’s second-largest sporting goods manufacturer, based in Herzogenaurach, Germany. Thermo-bonded are of elite tournament quality while the other categories are of lower standard.

Khawaja Hassan Masood, the Pakistani company’s head of new product development, estimates his company will supply more than 2 million Brazuca balls of various grades. Most World Cup balls come from China, he said in an interview at the factory.

Regain Share

“Pakistan can regain much lost share of football manufacturing from China, Vietnam and Indonesia,” Masood said. He added that it can raise its share of world soccer ball production, which was once 80 percent, to 50 percent from 18 percent in four years. “We get an edge with our labor wages as they are cheaper than China.”

The world’s leading ball manufacturer until the 1990s, Pakistan lost business to China in 2006-09, dropping almost half its global share to 13 percent, according to research by senior lecturerKhalid Nadvi of the University of Manchester, Peter Lund-Thomsen, associate professor at Copenhagen Business School, and others. China’s rose to 50 percent from 35 percent.

Adidas sold 13 million balls in a campaign based on the Jabulani ball in the 2010 World Cup and is confident it will exceed this with the Brazuca, company spokeswoman Silvia Raccagni said in an e-mailed comment. The official Brazuca match ball retails on Adidas’s website at $160, with lower-quality balls available at cheaper prices.

Minimum Wage

Adidas, sole supplier of the World Cup ball, declined to give a breakdown of geographical sourcing or details of commercial agreements. Masood declined to reveal production costs or the value of the Adidas contract.

Pakistan’s minimum wage of 10,000 rupees ($102) a month compares with the lowest minimum in China of 1,010 yuan ($162) in Anhui province last year. Overall, Chinese wages have tripled in a decade.

The International Labour Organization has established stitching centers in Pakistani villages to try to prevent under-age labor and stop children working at factories, small shops and in homes.

Sialkot, Pakistan’s main sports manufacturing center, boosted exports 20 percent to a record $1.05 billion in the year to June 2013, the manufacturers and exporters’ association said. Located in the central province of Punjab, the city also produces Nike Inc. (NKE) sports gloves and Slazenger hockey sticks.

Eager Audience

“A lot of brands have shifted to Sialkot,” said Khawar Anwar Khawaja, chief executive officer of Grays of Cambridge (Pakistan) Ltd., a manufacturer of hockey and cricket products who says he wants to tap the cricket-ball export market. “Our exports are very tiny if you compare them to the world. We can double or triple Sialkot’s exports if the government supports us.”

Pakistan has an eager audience for European soccer. People put up large public screens for Champions League finals, World Cup matches and other big games, while fans wear jerseys of top clubs such as Manchester United and Real Madrid.

“Cricket has been the sport of choice for many years but the trend has changed in the past 10 years,” Karachi United Football Club manager Adeel Rizki said by phone. “Regular coverage of European soccer has changed this. A lot more kids are liking football more than cricket now.”

Forward Sports’ Masood isn’t a soccer fan, though, so he won’t be glued to the World Cup exploits of Messi, Ronaldo & Co.

“A candy-maker never has a sweet tooth for his own product,” he said.

Pakistan May Surprise Maradona at World Cup in Brazil - Bloomberg

Photographer: Asad Zaidi/Bloomberg
An employee transports official Adidas Brazuca footballs on a trolley in a warehouse at at the Forward Sports (PVT) Ltd. factory in Sialkot, Pakistan.Close