Chinese Textile Exports Suffer During 2009

The textile and garment industry in China had a bumpy year in 2009 as exports fell 0.1 per cent to 167 billion US dollar, according to the statistics from China Customs.
Spokesman of the China National Textile and Apparel Council , Mr. Sun Huaibin blamed the decline on world-wide economic weakness as well as rising protectionism amid the global crisis. He said protectionism is mainly reflected in more stringent technical standard and ‘abuse of anti-dumping and subsidy measure’, as well as use of safeguard provisions on imports. Last year more than 30 foreign investigations and preliminary rulings ranging from raw materials to finished products were made on China’s textile exports. “ We have little control over the economic slump, yet we can do something in intellectual property to better protect our export-related textile business against protectionism,” Mr. Sun said.
Intellectual property is playing an increasingly important role in economic exchanges, especially with developed countries, he emphasized. European Union countries, the United States and Japan are destinations of more than half the country’s total textile and garment exports.
Domestic companies should increase awareness of respecting intellectual and at the same time protect their own legitimate interest, Mr. Sun said. While some have began to build brands, a great number of domestic clothes producers are still working as outsourced makers of other labels, known in the industry as original equipment manufacturing (OEM). That is not necessarily a problem, he said noting that the OEM business model offers opportunities to import advanced facilities and management experience while creating jobs. Some Chinese proprietary brands even have foreign sub-contractor as their OEMs , making significant progress in their brand build up, Mr. Sun said.