Virtually any industry which is globally dispersed shares one common goal: to increase profitability, mainly by reducing costs. Research has identified purchasing as one key logistical activity where the practitioners could enhance profits through leveraging costs. Hence, industries around the globe appreciate sourcing as one of the best strategies to achieve this objective. Global sourcing is an important factor, especially in the internationalisation of the production process of a business. The term “Global Sourcing” is used to describe the practice of sourcing of goods and services of higher quality across geopolitical boundaries. Global sourcing often aims at exploiting global efficiencies such as low cost skilled labour, low cost raw material and other economic factors including concessions on import/export taxes and trade tariffs [1]. Sri Lanka is one of the major high quality garment suppliers in the world. Purchasing raw material is the main stage of the apparel supply chain in view of fulfilling the garment supply. If raw materials are not abundant in one‟s own country, then producers could lower their supply risk by sourcing from global suppliers. Despite the importance of this factor, the literature shows that there has not been sufficient formal research carried out focusing on risk factors that the Sri Lankan apparel manufacturing companies face in global sourcing.

Sandamalika, H.K.D.S., & Jayaratne, P. (2018). Identifying the risk factors of global sourcing in the large scale apparel industry in Sri Lanka [Extended Abstract]. In T.L. Gunaruwan (Ed.), Proceedings of 1st International Conference on Research for Transport and Logistics Industry 2016 (pp. 167-170). Sri Lanka Society of Transport and Logistics. https://slstl.lk/r4tli-2016/