One out of every five sweaters globally comes from Dalang, Dongguan. This small southern town, with an annual garment output exceeding 900 million pieces and a supply chain transaction value surpassing 72 billion yuan, proved to attendees of the 95th International Wool Textile Conference that the wool industry is no sunset sector but a classic track being redefined by digital technology.
From Scale Dividend to Digital Dividend
Sun Ruizhe, President of the China National Textile and Apparel Council (CNTAC), released key data in his keynote: China's textile industry has exported over $300 billion annually for six consecutive years, with annual fiber processing exceeding 60 million tons and garment production topping 70 billion pieces, accounting for over 50% of global shares. But the structural shift matters more than scale. R&D investment intensity among large-scale enterprises rose from 1% at the end of the 13th Five-Year Plan to 1.3% in 2024, with high-performance fiber capacity exceeding one-third of the global total, extending applications to aerospace and marine engineering. This signals that China's wool industry is transitioning from a 'quantity' supplier to a 'quality' definer.
Dalang's agglomeration effect mirrors this transformation. As a wool knitting town grown from reform and opening up, Dalang is not just a production base but a coupling node of technology, market, and capital. Its annual output of over 900 million garments is backed by a complete ecosystem of yarn, fabric, design, dyeing, and logistics. This vertically integrated ecology enables any new technology—whether AI quality inspection or digital printing—to diffuse from lab to workshop in the shortest time.
Intelligent Economy Reshapes Wool Value Chain
Sun specifically noted that the global AI market is projected to reach $757.58 billion in 2025, up 18.7% year-on-year, while China's daily token calls have exceeded 140 trillion. What does this mean for wool textiles? The production function is being rewritten.
Yuedai Textile's 'lighthouse factory' in Jiangsu offers a benchmark: through intelligent manufacturing, labor per 10,000 spindles dropped about 70%, overall labor productivity rose over fourfold, unit energy consumption fell 15%, and processing costs declined 26%. This is not an isolated case. The digitalization rate of key links in China's textile industry has reached 63.2%, above the national manufacturing average. In 2024, 30 textile enterprises were included in the 5G factory list. Semir's AI-assisted design system boosted design R&D efficiency by 35%, with pattern design efficiency up over 200%. Bosideng's 'AI Aesthetics Brain' cut sample development costs by over 60%.
For wool enterprises, the signal is clear: the intelligent economy is not a future option but a survival threshold. Factories that first deploy AI vision inspection and digital twins in spinning, dyeing, and weaving will form a generational gap in quality consistency, delivery reliability, and cost competitiveness.
Convergence of Health Consumption and Green Responsibility
The conference theme 'Wool Health and Digital Life' precisely targets two global trends: consumers' renewed appreciation for natural fibers' health attributes, and the mandatory transmission of green responsibility from brands to upstream supply chains.
China's textile industry is accelerating commercial applications of water-free dyeing and digital printing. These technologies are critical for wool—traditionally a high-water, high-emission process. Breakthroughs in green tech will directly change compliance costs in international trade. Meanwhile, the global popularity of Chinese-style fashion is reshaping the value anchor of wool products. Anta and SHEIN have entered the GYBrand World's Top 500 Brands, while Hengli and Erdos deeply engage in global division of labor through cross-border M&A and multi-brand operations. This means Chinese wool enterprises are no longer just OEM makers but are becoming exporters of brand value and fashion discourse.
Pressure and Resilience in a Global Context
The industry is not without challenges. The IMF has cut its 2026 global growth forecast to 3.1%, with geopolitical conflicts, energy volatility, and shipping disruptions persisting. From January to April, revenue of large-scale textile enterprises fell 0.3% year-on-year, but total profit rose 19.3%, with a revenue profit margin of 2.9%. This 'revenue down, profit up' paradox precisely shows that the industry is digesting external pressure through efficiency gains and product upgrades.
Investment divergence is also telling. From January to May, fixed asset investment in the textile sector grew 10.8%, while garment and chemical fiber sectors fell 10.3% and 14.5% respectively. This means capital is concentrating on upstream manufacturing like spinning and weaving, while downstream garment processing faces capacity clearance. For wool supply chain buyers and factories, this is both a challenge and an opportunity—upstream smart investments will yield more stable quality supply, while downstream reshuffling means premium orders will concentrate on top players.