"War disruption hits exports: 20-year clients turn elsewhere", 9 April 2026

...the US Supreme Court upended the high tariffs...

But the relief was for a very short period, with the US-Iran war breaking out just within days and now disrupting supply further due to the blocking of the Strait of Hormuz and the closure of airspace in the Middle East, which was one of the ways to transport inventory from India...

“Customers with whom we built relationships over … 10,15,20 years are now starting to look elsewhere, which has almost never happened in the past...” said [Vikranth Reddy, Director of Franch Exports]...

According to him, the situation is now too chaotic, effectively forcing both parties to explore alternative options...

Franch Exports is a buying office and is in contract with over 50 factories in India, Bangladesh and China. The company...supplies almost 95 per cent of its total export capacity to US companies, including Aeropostale, FILA, Walmart and Amazon...

“If you can buy like a million pieces, you would rather buy 10,000, see what happens, and then when things calm down, you can buy the rest because from a buyer point of view, if they buy huge volumes like what they normally do and if they are stuck with it paying a higher price and then they are not able to sell it at the planned price, then they are facing a loss,” he explained.

Reddy highlighted that it was a vice-versa situation for manufacturers as well, who think they can make it at a certain price and when eventually the dollar drops, costs could go up considerably in a “very, very short period of time.”

“...manufacturers are not taking on entire production capacity and customers are not placing orders like they would normally,” he noted

Reddy noted that Franch was trying to keep all of its sourcing within India, as volumes are seeing a dip following a pullback in orders by retailers and import costs are seeing an uptick...

“Ideally, at this point we would be getting a lot more summer orders...but it is maybe at about 30 to 35 per cent of what it could be,” he mentioned...

Holiday season is generally the most important shopping period for retailers with several of these companies raking in a major chunk of their revenue during the October to December period...

“...ideally by now we would be getting a lot more orders, but it is probably about 25 per cent of what we should be getting.” Reddy said.

He highlighted that everyone wants to just “wait and watch” since there is a lot of speculation that consumer buying is also going down. “...Sales teams in the US are feeling the pressure of selling similar volumes, so the buying teams are told to reduce quantities...” he added.

Reddy...added that the war, per se, has not affected the prices of the products yet...