The closure of seven garment factories in the Northern Marianas since last year and reduced orders have resulted in a 28 percent or an over 108 million US dollar drop in industry sales during the first six months of the fiscal year.
The governor's special assistant for trade relations, Richard Pierce, says garment sales reached 277-POINT-5 million dollars between October 2005 and March 2006, compared to nearly 386 million during the same period in fiscal year 2005.
He attributed the decrease in garment sales to the big reduction in orders received by garment factories on Saipan to stiff industry competition from other countries paying much lower than the CNMI's 3-dollar hourly wage.
