Source: China Nonwoven and Industrial Textile Association (CNITA)

1. General Development Trend of Chinese Industrial Textile

In the last decade, industrial textile in China has already experienced rapid increase, especially the last five years with annual growth rate of above 18%. In 2007, the output of industrial textile in china was 5443.2 thousand tons, which is 906.2 thousand tons more than that of 2006 and occupies 15.4% of the total output of textile fibers. In 2007, the import and export amounts were 27.6 and 50.6 billion dollars respectively. The export of industrial textile takes 30% of total output, while the export of non-woven occupies 13% of total yield. Industrial textile has already been applied in agrotech, buildtech, clothtech, hometech, indutech, medtech, mobiltech, oekotech, packtech, protech and sporttech with exclusive technical requirements different from regular clothing and home textile.

2. Economic Structure and Layout Feature of the Development of Industrial Textile in China

According to the end-use of the product, textile industry can be simply classified into three main categories of clothing, home textile and industrial textile and the proportion of these categories may reflect the level of textile technology development. The development of industrial textile with more requirements of high technology implies the reasonable structure of textile industry. After more than ten years development, the proportion of industrial textile among the whole textile industry gradually enhances from 8% in 1990 to 15% in 2007. The increasing percentage shows the optimized industrial structure of textile, however, big differences still exist as compared with developed countries, as shown in Table 1.

Table 1: Comparisons of Fiber Consumption Structure

3. International Competitive Ability of industrial textile in China

Although Chinese textile and clothing industry has been effected by adjustment of export refund rate since 1995, the Chinese government still keeps encouraging the export of industrial textile by the way of keeping the constant export refund rate of 11%. In recent years, industrial textiles keep pace with clothing and home textile in the ratio of international market and the international competitive ability of the whole textile industry keeps enhancing. As can be seen from Table 2, the index of competitive ability of industrial textile keeps rising in the last five years.