KARACHI: Pakistan textile exports plunged by 22.63% in June 2026 as compared to the same month last year despite the fact that the country’s textile sector ended its financial year on a positive note. Textile exports earned a total revenue of $1.282 billion as against $1.522 billion earned last year. May had told a different story, exporters shipped $1.657 billion that month, which means June’s tally slid by roughly $375 million in just four weeks.
Pakistan Textile Exports Slide
The full fiscal year closed at $17.97 billion, edging past last year’s $17.91 billion by a slim 0.34 percent. Strip away the percentage, though, and the picture looks less comfortable: the entire year’s gain came to under $60 million, a sum that June’s single-month decline swallowed several times over.
The industry entered June on stronger footing. May’s $1.657 billion figure had kept the sector on track for a comfortable year-end tally. June’s numbers broke that trend, and the timing matters: a decline this size at the close of the fiscal year cut deep into gains built over the previous eleven months rather than getting absorbed early, when the sector had more room to recover.
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Textiles remain Pakistan’s largest export category and a direct input into the country’s current account balance. The sector’s performance shapes how much foreign exchange the country earns without relying on remittances or foreign borrowing, and a full year that finished flat rather than genuinely growing leaves less cushion for external account management heading into FY2026-27.
Sources did not attribute June’s drop to a specific cause. Global apparel markets have moved through inventory corrections over the past year, with major buyers in the US and Europe adjusting order volumes after earlier overstocking. Whether that pattern reached Pakistani exporters directly, or whether June reflected order timing specific to individual buyers, remains unclear from the data available.
Textile Exports Outlook
The fiscal year’s arithmetic leaves little margin for error going forward. Pakistan needed under $60 million in net additional exports to keep FY2025-26 in positive territory, and it barely cleared that bar. A repeat of June’s contraction at any point next year, without an equally strong month elsewhere to offset it, would tip the annual number into decline.
July’s data will show whether June was a one-off or the start of a slower run. For an industry that carries the weight of Pakistan’s export earnings, a fiscal year that technically grew but rested on a single month’s contraction leaves the sector heading into FY2026-27 with far less room to absorb shocks than the headline number suggests.
