China's wool textile import and export total reached US$11.7 billion in the first eight months of 2026, but the growth structure is visibly tilting. Import growth of 33.67% outpaced export growth of 6.82% by more than five times. This gap, drawn from China Customs data, reveals a fact obscured by headline growth figures: China's wool textile sector is undergoing an input-cost shock driven by raw material prices, not a demand-led expansion.
Volume-Price Divergence on the Import Side
Wool and preliminary processed wool imports totaled US$1.87 billion, up 48.19% year-on-year, yet import volume reached only 213,000 tonnes, a mere 4.56% increase. The gap between value and volume points directly to pricing: the average import price hit US$8.77/kg, up 41.73% year-on-year. In other words, buyers paid nearly half as much again in premiums while receiving less than 5% more physical volume.
For procurement teams, this volume-price structure means bargaining room on the raw material side has been substantially compressed. When import value growth exceeds volume growth by more than tenfold, there is virtually no operational leeway to dilute costs by increasing purchase volumes.
Notably, August's average wool import price was US$8.96/kg, down 7.5% month-on-month, with other animal fibers recording the same 7.5% sequential decline. This signals that the rapid price ascent is topping out, but absolute prices remain elevated, and downstream cost pressure will not ease materially on the back of a single month's dip.
Divergence on the Export Side
Beneath the headline export figure of US$8.56 billion, up 6.82%, lies significant divergence across categories. Apart from woven wool garments, whose export volume fell 9.49% to 11.06 million pieces, all other major wool textile categories recorded volume growth. On pricing, export prices for preliminary processed and mid-to-downstream products fluctuated between -5% and 6% year-on-year, indicating limited pricing power overall.
Woven wool garments were the sole category to achieve meaningful price increases — average export price reached US$48.65 per piece, up 18.23% year-on-year. This increase substantially offset revenue losses from declining shipment volumes. Why can garments raise prices while intermediate goods cannot? The answer lies in market positioning: garments face end consumers directly, where brand premiums and design value confer pricing power, while yarns and fabrics sit mid-chain, facing equally pressured downstream customers with inherently limited room to raise prices.
This sends a clear signal to factories: a model reliant purely on capacity scale and volume growth is no longer viable for maintaining margins in a high raw-material-cost environment.
The Bottleneck in Cost Pass-Through
The core contradiction facing the wool textile sector is that raw material price increases far exceed finished product price increases. Import prices rose 41.73%, while export prices for most products fluctuated between -5% and 6%. This enormous gap can only be absorbed by the enterprises themselves.
This pass-through bottleneck affects different players unevenly. Garment companies with their own brands and end-market channels can pass some costs to consumers through price increases. Pure OEM producers of intermediate goods, however, face a squeeze from both sides — rising upstream raw material costs and downstream customers unwilling to accept price hikes.
From a regional industrial cluster perspective, clusters specializing in worsted fabrics and wool knitwear processing, such as those in the Jiangsu-Zhejiang area, face more direct impact, as these regions concentrate large numbers of SMEs primarily exporting intermediate goods.