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| Local celebrities promote Chinese apparel brands. (Pictured is Chen Daoming for Lilanz menswer) |
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Nowadays, a comprehensive textile and apparel supply chain has been established in the city with chemical-fiber manufacturing, activities of weaving, dyeing and printing, as well as garment-making. In addition to being a key production area of textile and apparel goods, Jinjiang is also a distribution center in the nation.
The textile supply chain in the Jinjiang city is comprised of several towns, which have developed their own specialization to serve the neighborhood.
Outlined by director of the Jinjiang Textile & Garment Association (JTGA) (晉江市紡織服裝協會), Chen Weijin (陳偉進), Longhu Town (龍湖鎮) mainly specializes in the manufacture of chemical fibers, whereas woven fabrics are often sourced from the towns of Longhu (龍湖鎮) and Yinglin (英林鎮). Dyeing and finishing processes are done at Shenhu town-based (深滬鎮) factories, whilst garment are sewn in southern towns of Jinjiang.
With some 3,000 textile and apparel enterprises and a workforce exceeding 200,000 people, the city of Jinjiang was named as a textile industrial base in the country by the China National Textile & Apparel Council (CNTAC) (中國紡織工業協會) in 2004.
Bettering management with public offerings
As business operations have got more sophisticated, textile and apparel manufacturers in Jinjiang have found new ways to improve their competitiveness.
Some made use of public offerings on the stock exchange to raise capital as well as improve corporate governance, said Hong Yuquan (洪于權), Executive Vice-mayor of Jinjiang municipal government.
About 17 textile and apparel firms in Jinjiang are now listed on mainland China or Hong Kong, according to Mr Chen at JTGA. "Public listing raises funds for the company development, and also helps improve enterprises’ prestige and management quality," he said.
Anta (安踏) sportswear firm, for instance, was listed in Hong Kong in 2007. Ding Zhizhong (丁志忠), Chairman and major shareholder of the family-run company, said: "The public listing has effectively separated factors of the family from business operations. The firm is operated in a more systematic and transparent way."
In face of the global financial crisis, the Jinjiang authorities have offered support to the industry in areas like corporate financing, land use, entering international markets, industrial optimization and improvements in public infrastructure, said Mr Hong, who was satisfied with positive effects brought by these favorable policies.
Based on the data of the Chinese authorities, the Jinjiang textile and apparel industry achieved an output value of RMB20 billion for the first half of 2009, accounting for a quarter of the entire city's total industrial output value. Meanwhile, the textile and apparel export of the city amounted to US$2.54 billion, up 2.8% from that of 2008 despite the credit crunch in the West. It represented 26.4% of the city's total export value.
Learning in Asian financial crisis
Growth of the Jinjiang textile and apparel industry had not been smooth all the time. The city rapidly developed original equipment manufacturing (OEM) activities throughout the 1990s until the 1997 Asian financial crisis.
Jinjiang's textile entrepreneurs, taking a hard blow, learned to invest in proprietary product research and brand building. In 1998, the municipal government of Jinjiang initiated a strategy of creating local brands. International technology, know-how and machines were imported to improve product quality.
The Jinjiang textile and apparel industry now operates more than 10,000 imported shuttleless looms; 7,000 circular knitting machines; 200 advanced warp knitting machines from German suppliers; 150 sizing machines and cutting-edge dyeing and finishing equipment. Producers in the city have also extensively used technologies of computer-aided design (CAD).
Currently, menswear is a major apparel product of the city, and leading suppliers include Anta (安踏) (sportswear) and Lilanz (利郎) (men's suits and leisure wear). Both of them are listed in Hong Kong.
Celebrities from the Chinese entertainment sector are employed as image ambassadors of these newly created apparel brands. Chen Daoming (陳道明), one of the best known male actors on mainland China, has represented formal suits of Lilanz since 2002. Targeting consumer groups aged between 24 and 45, the company sees enormous opportunities across county-level cities and rural areas of China, said its president and executive director, Wang Liangxing (王良星)
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