Export pressure, domestic demand divergence, and profit narrowing—this is the scorecard for China's garment industry in the first half of 2026, and the true backdrop on the eve of the 15th Five-Year Plan. On June 25, the 8th 2nd Council Meeting of the China National Garment Association convened in Huizhou, releasing a core signal: the industry is at an inflection point shifting from industrial manufacturing to a technology, fashion, and creativity-driven sector, with the next five years' strategic focus turning entirely toward building a brand power.
Data Divergence: Two Extremes of Export and Domestic Demand
Operating data disclosed at the meeting by the China National Textile and Apparel Council and association leadership painted a complex picture for H1 2026. On the export side, weak international demand, intensified geopolitical conflicts, and supply chain disruptions drove a volatile decline in garment exports. On the domestic side, in-depth implementation of consumption stimulus actions gradually improved market activity, supporting relatively fast growth in domestic sales. Production remained generally stable, but investment continued to shrink, putting severe pressure on corporate profitability.
What does this divergence mean? For export-oriented enterprises, traditional order models are facing both volume and price declines, urgently requiring new growth anchors. The recovery in domestic demand is more concentrated in niche tracks like guochao (national trend), outdoor sports, and silver economy—where brands are deepening omnichannel deployment, fully demonstrating industry resilience. For procurement departments, this directly signals that the era of relying solely on scale expansion is over; differentiation and branding are the moats against cyclical fluctuations.
AI and Digital Twins: The Third Paradigm Shift is Underway
If data represents the current stress test, then technological change points to future competitive thresholds. During the sharing session at the meeting, Liu Chen, General Manager of Zhejiang Lingdi Digital Technology Co., Ltd., presented a noteworthy insight: generative AI, industrial simulation, embodied intelligence, and organizational intelligence have all simultaneously reached technological breakthroughs. The fusion of multiple technologies will completely restructure the garment industry ecosystem from three core dimensions.
Specifically, the design end is transitioning from manual drawing to human-machine co-creation, with designers evolving into curators of aesthetics and trend judgment, significantly compressing new product development cycles. The manufacturing end will transform into intelligent agent factories with autonomous perception and feedback capabilities, allowing tacit craftsmanship knowledge to be precipitated, improving quality control and replication efficiency. The supply chain end will break traditional linear models, forming a real-time collaborative network of brands, factories, and consumers, with digital twin interoperability becoming a new threshold for industry collaboration.
The transformation case of Bossini's parent company, Sunrise Group, provides a practical sample. With a fifty-year history, the company has progressed from e-commerce deployment to digital brand ecosystem construction, and then to the enterprise-level AI agent matrix launched in 2025, gradually achieving balanced development across multiple platforms, brands, and categories. Its path clearly shows that digital transformation cannot stop at single-point breakthroughs; enterprises must strengthen overall top-level design, systematically consolidate core data assets and knowledge graphs, and avoid fragmented investments.
Brand Power: The Underlying Logic from 'Made in China' to 'Created in China'
The consensus formed at the meeting is that brand building is not an overnight effort; it requires a long-termist mindset to forge brand resilience. Current brand competition has shifted from scale expansion to a comprehensive contest of original design, cultural spirit, and emotional experience. Eastern aesthetics, as a unique cultural asset of local brands in the global fashion context, is becoming an irreplicable competitive barrier.
In terms of brand going global, enterprises should leverage deep cultural heritage and high value-added products to reshape overseas market perceptions of Chinese brands. In his concluding remarks, President Sun Ruizhe further pointed out that the industry must clarify its historical position: China's textile and garment sector firmly ranks in the global first tier, with a complete industrial chain and leading production and sales scale, but still has shortcomings. The Fourth Plenary Session of the 20th Central Committee of the Communist Party has listed textiles as a key industry for optimization and upgrading, and the garment industry bears the important mission of consolidating global industrial competitiveness.
Facing the 15th Five-Year Plan, the industry needs to coordinate five major development mindsets: AI-native thinking under the intelligent economy, future industry thinking under the science and innovation economy, experience economy thinking under the service economy, shared value thinking under the responsible economy, and open development thinking under the global economy. These five mindsets are not theoretical abstractions but directly correspond to every step of an enterprise's operations from product to brand, from domestic to global.