Fabric Exports Continue To Grow, Cross-Border Electricity Supplier Huge Potential

Recently, Alibaba international station released the "textile industry cross border electricity supplier development report" shows that in recent years, China's textile export development trend is good, export volume increases year by year. The report shows that between 2001 and 2018, China's textile industry grew rapidly, with an increase of 179%. In 2018, China's textile exports reached 21 billion meters, accounting for about 1/4 of world textile exports. The huge trade surplus brought by fabric export has gradually become one of the main sources of foreign exchange in China.

This year, Alibaba international station has released a series of reports on specific industries selected for the 10 featured industries in China, analyzing the buyers' portraits from the front end of the trade, and providing industry side guidance for sellers.

The report shows that in the first 5 months, China's total exports of textiles, yarns, fabrics and products amounted to US $48 billion 310 million, up 1.5% over the same period last year, of which fabric exports accounted for nearly 70%, while the rest of the yarn and textile accessories such as feather and lace were 30%.

According to the above report, the countries and regions along the belt and road have become the main export place of China's textile fabrics. From the national trend, Vietnam is China's largest fabric export market, accounting for about 9% of China's textile exports and 10% of its export volume.

In an interview with China trade daily, Shen Xiaoyan, senior operator of Alibaba home international, said that China has always been a big exporter of textiles, and textiles are also one of the pillar industries of China's exports. The improvement of China's textile upstream and downstream industry chain has strong competitive advantages from spinning, weaving, dyeing to garment processing.

Shen Xiaoyan said that in recent years, with the rise of wage level, China's garment processing in the textile industry chain has gradually lost its price advantage, causing some garment processing enterprises to move out. Southeast Asia's Vietnam, Indonesia, Kampuchea, and South Asia's India, Bangladesh and other garment processing plants sprang up everywhere, making use of the cheap labor force to make garments and exported to Europe and the United States. Despite the rapid growth of garment processing industry in these emerging countries, the self sufficiency rate of fabrics in China is seriously insufficient and needs to rely heavily on imports.

According to the report, with the continuous improvement of China's textile technology level, China's textile imports continue to decrease in recent years. With the ever increasing capability of independent research and development of fabrics, some high-end fabrics that have been monopolized by Europe, America and Japan have been able to achieve independent production in China. The export of Chinese fabrics has also been on the low end to the high end, especially functional fabrics and printing. At present, Southeast Asian countries have become the main market of China's printing and dyeing cloth exports.

In this regard, Shen Xiaoyan said that China's fabric production is not only the first in terms of scale production, but also the top quality product in the world. It is the preferred country for the import of fabrics in Southeast Asian countries, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Taking Bangladesh as an example, its fabric self-sufficiency rate is only 20%, and the rest are imported from China, especially the polyester and spandex fabrics with the strongest advantages in China, which import billions of dollars from China every year. Bangladesh is also second only to the United States, and the second largest destination for Chinese fabric enterprises exported to Alibaba international station.

Faced with the huge business opportunities of fabric exports, Shen Xiaoyan suggested that Chinese enterprises should do well in internal work, maintain their sense of crisis, and be brave in developing new markets, especially in Bangladesh, Vietnam and even Africa, so as to find new growth points to reduce the risks associated with trade friction between traditional Europe and the United States. At the same time, we should pay attention to product R & D and after-sales service, and upgrade the value added products through upgrading. According to the buyer's portrait and behavior analysis of Alibaba international station, fabrics will pay more and more attention to the two major themes of regeneration, environmental protection and functionality. The fabric varieties will continue to be broken down, and there will be more and more kinds of fabrics under specific situations, such as yoga pants, beach pants and so on, instead of simply staying in the traditional sense of weaving, knitting and so on. Chinese fabric enterprises should continue to explore and innovate, make full use of the platform of international stations, and seize the dividends of fabric going to sea.

Guo Xiaobei, a researcher of industrial development at Minsheng Bank Research Institute, told reporters that the "one belt and one way" initiative coincided with the critical period of the historic changes in China's textile industry, bringing new opportunities for China's textile industry to go global, integrate global resources and achieve high quality development. A total of 65 countries and regions along the "one belt" road, with a total population of 4 billion 400 million and a total of about 21 trillion US dollars, account for 29% of the world's total. Chinese textile enterprises should make use of overseas investment and mergers and acquisitions to vertically extend the global quality resources such as raw materials, design, brand and market channels, so as to increase the added value of the whole industry. In addition, we should fully combine and make use of the complementarity between the countries and regions along the "one belt and one road" along with China's textile and clothing fields so as to achieve shared and win-win results.

Data show that in 2018, China's fabric production was 49 billion meters, all concentrated in the southeast coastal developed areas. Among them, Zhejiang, Jiangsu and Fujian ranked the top three in the country's fabric production, accounting for 58.95%, 12.66% and 11.46% of the total output respectively. As for the volume concentration of merchants, Alibaba international station mainly focuses on East China, which accounts for about 87% of the total number of merchants. Shaoxing, Suzhou and Jiaxing rank the top. As far as competition is concerned, there is still huge room for development of Alibaba's international station on the offline scale.

Under the trend of economic globalization and rapid development of e-commerce, cross-border electricity supplier industry is showing a huge market space, attracting textile and garment enterprises layout. However, Guo Xiaobei also reminded that textile and garment enterprises can not guarantee the success of cross-border electric business. After all, cross-border electricity supplier is only a channel. In the future, as competition intensifies, the key to competition is still the product, that is, to satisfy the customers' high performance price ratio or the extreme specialization in the field of subdivision. Localization service competition will become the key point of cross-border transactions in the future.