From a supplier at New Market to entrepreneur extraordinaire

Equipment is needed to make wooden furniture. Does all the equipment come from abroad? Wood furniture factories have been set up in all the districts and upazilas of Bangladesh. The good news is that all the required equipment is being made in Bangladesh. At one time all this had to be imported.

Everest Wood Working Machine is now well well-known for supplying equipment to medium and large furniture manufacturers across the country. The company sells equipment worth more than Tk 150 million (Tk 15 crore) a year. These devices cost from Tk 35,000 to Tk 200,000.

Md. Yusuf and Rasheda Akhter have built up this business for furniture manufacturing equipment over the last 15 years. They now have hundreds of workers in four factories, making machines and machine parts. These machines are distributed all over the country for the manufacture of intricately carved doors and furniture. These factories are located mainly at Shahzadpur and Badda in the capital.

Upon visiting the factory, the workers were seen making new machines, all of steel. Some were cutting steel, so someone busy in melding the steel together. All the equipment were being made in the factory. Local and foreign motors were being used in making the devices. In turn, these devices are contributing to the expansion of the local furniture industry.

Let’s look into what devices are being manufactured in these factories. These are probably completely unfamiliar to most readers. However, the names are quite familiar to the people involved in the furniture industry. There are different shapes and sizes of jointer planers, thick chain planers, circular saws, moulder machines, two-in-one jointers and thick nature, three-in-one jointer-thick nature-circular, and four-in-one jointer-thick nature-circular-straight mouldings and other equipment are manufactured at the Everest factory.

Factory worker Saidul Islam said new work orders are constantly coming in. “We continue to work all the time. Furniture cannot be made without these devices now-a-days.”

Financial institution IDLC said Everest Wood Working Machine is a good client. They take loans and repay regularly.

Proprietor of Everest Wood, Md. Yusuf, said, “I used to make the equipment myself. Now we have more than a hundred workers. There is no district or upazila where our equipment is not used.”

Prior to 2005, Md Yusuf worked at New Market, supplying goods. The same year he started making furniture-manufacturing equipment without any preparation. He started making small devices, first sketching the designs on paper. He hasn’t looked back since then. Gradually his factory has grown expanded. Earlier the equipment used to go to some specific areas, now it has spread to different parts of the country. Everest is now a well-known name to carpenters.