News

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Morrison Textile Machinery Co. (Morrison), a small business located in Fort Lawn, S.C., made a larger-than-usual sale of equipment to Egypt, and sustained jobs at its plant back home, by using a loan guarantee from the Export-Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im Bank).

The competitive $7 million medium-term loan guarantee motivated DNM Textiles for Spinning, Weaving and Dyeing (DNM), Damietta, Egypt, to buy the Morrison equipment to establish a new denim production plant within the Damietta Free Zone. DNM is owned by Eroglu Holding, Istanbul, Turkey. The Bank of New York Mellon is the guaranteed lender on the transaction. The Turkish guarantor is Asya Katilim Bankasi A.S.

Ex-Im Bank's guarantee helped the customer justify the scale of the project, said Morrison President John Morrison White, Jr., great grandson of the company's founder. We are exporting two different textile manufacturing systems to the Egyptian plant at one time. Usually a client orders a single system and then a year later maybe orders again. This double-size sale will have a big impact on our business.

Before the sale to Egypt, Morrison, which now has about 95 employees, had to lay off about 10 percent of its workforce last year, mainly office workers rather than its plant workers, to stabilize the company in the face of declining exports.

Usually 90 percent of our business is exports, but last year exports accounted for about 40 percent of the total, White said. We'll probably double exports this year, and maintain or increase our workforce.

We're proud that our competitive financing helped keep U.S. workers on the job at Morrison Textile Machinery and other U.S. small businesses, said Ex-Im Bank Chairman and President Fred P. Hochberg. Such export financing enables American companies to sell their high-quality products in growing markets such as Egypt, and can lead to follow-on business. We are ready to support that growth.

Eroglu Holding also is the owner of Eroglu Garment Manufacturing Co. and Collin's brand, the largest retail chain in Turkey and Russia according to Eroglu Holding CEO Murat Karadut. With this investment Eroglu Holding will accomplish the vertical integration from cotton field to consumer.

Ex-Im Bank is the official export-credit agency of the United States. The independent federal government agency helps to create and maintain U.S. jobs by financing the sales of U.S. exports, primarily to emerging markets throughout the world, providing loan guarantees, export-credit insurance and direct loans.

Ex-Im Bank's export loan authorizations more than doubled to $13.2 billion during the first half of the current fiscal year. That is a 125 percent increase over the record $5.9 billion authorized during the same period in Fiscal Year 2009. Small business export loan authorizations increased half a billion dollars during the same period to $2.3 billion, 28 per cent greater than the first half of FY2009. An estimated 109,000 American jobs have been supported by the Bank's financing this fiscal year to date, compared to about 61,000 jobs supported during the same period last fiscal year. More information is available on the Bank's web site at www.exim.gov.