In the first two months of 2026, China's textile and apparel exports reached $50.45 billion, up 17.6% year-on-year. Textile exports alone hit $25.57 billion, growing 20.5%; apparel exports stood at $24.87 billion, up 14.8%. However, investment data showed a sharp divergence: fixed asset investment in the textile sector rose 18.8%, while apparel and chemical fiber sectors fell 3.3% and 11.9% respectively. This contrast sparked heated discussion at the inaugural Shenzhen Textile & Apparel Technology Innovation Conference.
Structural Shift: From Scale Leadership to Value Dominance
SUN Ruizhe, President of the China National Textile and Apparel Council (CNTAC), clearly stated in his keynote that the industry has entered a new development stage. Total fiber processing volume remains stable above 60 million tons, and exports have exceeded $300 billion for six consecutive years. In 2025, revenue of above-scale enterprises reached RMB 4.5 trillion. But the more noteworthy change is structural: in 2024, the fiber consumption ratio of apparel, home textiles, and industrial textiles adjusted to 41:27:32, with industrial textiles' share continuing to rise. High-performance fiber capacity now accounts for over one-third of global capacity, and digitalization rate across key links reached 63.2%, higher than the national manufacturing average. This signals a shift from pure scale expansion to quality-and-efficiency-driven growth.
Four Structural Transformations: Factors, Drivers, Markets, Rules
SUN argued that the industry faces not cyclical fluctuations but profound structural and landscape-level changes. At the factor level, geopolitics is repricing labor and raw material costs. In March, polyester filament yarn surged over 29%, and PA66 entered the "20,000 yuan era." Supply chain logic has shifted from efficiency-first to resilience-first—over 70% of global manufacturers now prioritize supply chain resilience over pure cost efficiency. At the driver level, technology iteration accelerates, with the protection period for single-technology excess profits compressed to under 18 months. Zhongfu Shenying's T1200-grade carbon fiber achieved strength surpassing 8,000 MPa, ten times that of ordinary steel, opening new applications in low-altitude equipment and embodied intelligence. At the market level, global GDP growth is projected to slow from 3.3% in 2025 to 2.9% in 2026, with US consumer confidence hitting its lowest since May 2014. Domestically, net household deposits surged to a record RMB 78.02 trillion, reflecting a tug-of-war between weak consumer confidence and rising precautionary savings.
Shenzhen as a Unique Test Bed for Transformation
Shenzhen was chosen as the venue for the inaugural conference for a reason. The city's high innovation activity, consumption vitality, and openness provide fertile ground for the textile industry's transition from manufacturing to smart manufacturing and from products to services. Data from the conference shows that industry-university-research collaborative projects led by enterprises accounted for 41.5% of CNTAC's science awards, indicating that cross-border integration is key to unlocking new drivers. Cases like Siren Care, which embeds micro temperature sensors into smart socks to improve diabetic foot ulcer risk prediction accuracy by 87%, demonstrate that textile industry boundaries are dissolving, and value is shifting from "product" to "product plus service."