Guarantee-backed product quality
With the growing and mandatory requirements of the Western
consumers in particular, the Chinese textile and garment producers have become
deeply conscious of maintaining quality along side the social compliance, which
has been a casualty all along. It is here that The Sri Lankan products have
started earning a few brownie points over their competitors by committing and
swearing themselves on the ecology. Better quality of products, supported by
ecological parameters find ready acceptability anywhere in the world,
particularly in the more lucrative markets of the US and the EU and in any
case, get far better prices than the mass produced apparels.
The China National Textile and Apparel Council is co-operating
with the Foreign Trade Association in Brussels, the European Commission, the
US-based Worldwide Responsible Accredited Production (WRAP) and many retailers
to build a responsible international supply chain.
Joint Initiatives among Chinese companies
As a recent development, the Chinese companies have been
driven to consider joint initiatives in improving their processing. What some
of the smaller companies could not achieve better processing facilities,
because of higher costs involved, they have now chosen to collectively own a
common processing unit to process their products at world class standards. Last
year, eight textile dyeing and printing plants in Dongguan invested around
US$4.5m in a water processing plant.
Avoiding price competition
There has been an intense, often bordering cut throat
competition among the Chinese manufacturers themselves who have been
undercutting each other in offering the same level of technology or machinery
or even other products. This gave distinct and perhaps undue advantage to their
buyers. There is biw a common realization that unless they themselves start
avoiding under-quoting their prices to win over the buyers, each of them would
be net loser. In Haining (l00 km from Shanghai), a city that claims to
represent 25% of China's warp knitting industry, a price index system has been
established to allow companies to adjust the pricing of their products to avoid
"vicious price competition".
As someone rightly said, necessity is the mother of
invention. New strategies are being invented and evolved by Chinese textiles
and garment exporters to meet the new challenges that a dynamic world of international
trade keeps on posing.
Originally
published in The Stitch Times: March 2009
