Foreign Trade News: Textile And Clothing Foreign Trade Needs To Increase The Share Of Non Physical Income

At present, foreign trade orders of China's textile and garment industry are picking up and attracting orders from Southeast Asia and South Asia. The industrial blue book: report on China's industrial competitiveness (2020) No.9 issued by the China industry and enterprise competitiveness research center of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences also holds an optimistic view on the competitiveness prospects of China's textile and garment industry.

On the whole, the epidemic situation in South Asia, Southeast Asia and Europe and the United States is grim. China's performance in epidemic prevention and control is good, which indeed brings more opportunities and room for maneuver for China's textile and garment industry. However, the industry suffers from such pain points as the meager profit and the shipwreck of cargo booking. This phenomenon reminds textile and garment enterprises once again that, facing the window period brought by the epidemic, they should not immerse themselves in the traditional and extensive profit ideas such as material and quantity, but should expand non physical benefits.

To be specific, one of the directions is to provide supply chain management services for domestic and foreign textile and garment enterprises. The textile and garment industry has a long upstream and downstream chain, covering a lot of raw materials, intermediate products and finished products, such as cotton, spinning, wool germ, clothing, etc. Because China has a good industrial foundation and material supply capacity in the whole textile and garment industry chain, even though some textile and garment orders have been snatched by Vietnam in recent years, Vietnam still imports a large number of textile and garment raw materials from China. In addition, the epidemic has affected the production capacity and supply capacity of many countries, including Vietnam. Now is the time for some Chinese textile and garment enterprises to further deepen their efforts in the field of supply chain management services.

This kind of supply chain management service includes supply and demand information service, procurement guide service, consultation service for stabilizing supply chain and warehousing service for domestic and foreign textile and garment enterprises, as well as pricing right construction and transaction center construction of some mature categories. Considering that China has many global textile and garment fabrics and accessories supply centers like Guangzhou International light and Textile City, although many categories have many competitors, it is difficult to form a unique competitiveness. However, under the current epidemic situation, as long as the cultivation and construction of some categories, it is possible to form a stronger voice. The key is that the industry can no longer use macro, general and quantitative thinking to operate these categories. This kind of category added value construction is also different from short-sighted and quick money hoarding, but needs to be based on medium and long-term strategic measures.

Another direction is to encourage strong and ambitious textile and garment enterprises to participate more in the design process of international division of labor. The United States, France and Italy are the leaders and major publishers of fashion design and fashion trends. The fashion design industry of Japan in Asia has risen since the 1980s. At the same time, Japan is also an important transit station for European and American fashion trends to spread to Asia. It is not easy for Chinese fashion design to rise like Japan in a short period of time. However, during the epidemic period, the United States, France and Italy released popular design trends to drive the Japanese trend. Then, the classic transmission model of OEM in China, Southeast Asia and South Asia was damaged, which was manifested in many aspects. For example, when European and American large enterprises are looking for OEM enterprises in China, Southeast Asia and South Asia, they could have compared goods with many other countries. Once they found that the cost of manufacturing in India could be reduced by 2% compared with that in China, they might decide to transfer some orders from China to India. In recent years, many textile and garment orders from China to Vietnam are similar in logic, but the epidemic situation is obviously limited Given the choice of large European and American enterprises in comparison with three or more countries, these international purchasers can accept even if they know that the quotation for production in China is a few percentage points higher.

Objectively speaking, this kind of temporary more discourse power does not help the transformation and upgrading of the majority of small and medium-sized textile and garment enterprises, because the small textile enterprises with dozens of people could not afford to support designers. Now, after the orders from South Asia and Southeast Asia return to China, such small textile enterprises can not afford to support designers even if their foreign trade orders get hot. This temporary appearance of more discourse power is mainly good for large and medium-sized textile and clothing enterprises and clothing design institutions. Aspiring large and medium-sized textile and clothing enterprises and clothing design institutions can contact and discuss with large enterprises and institutions in Europe and America, strive to upgrade their role from OEM to cooperator, or strive for more participation in peripheral and low-end links of fashion design. In this transformation and upgrading attempt, we need to explore the psychology of those who have the advantage of smile curve in Europe and the United States: under the environment that the industry and academia are thinking about the regionalization of industrial chain and shortening the division chain to reduce the risk of supply chain, large enterprises and institutions in Europe and the United States will not fail to think about these issues. Their thinking, emergency response and adjustment actually contain the potential space for Chinese enterprises to upgrade.

In the final analysis, it is hoped that China's textile and garment industry will gain more and share more from information services, management and design. The non physical characteristics of such benefits mean that no matter how high the amount is, they do not need to book shipping space and are less restricted by the physical level. It would be a great pity if the powerful or ambitious Chinese textile and garment industry did not do more things with more added value and more intangible benefits, so that the window of opportunity brought by the epidemic situation would be missed in vain.