One out of every five sweaters worldwide is made in Dalang, Dongguan. This wool knitting town has seen its entire industry chain transaction value surpass 72 billion yuan in 2025, with annual garment output exceeding 900 million pieces. As the scale effect of industrial clusters meets the wave of smart manufacturing, China's textile sector is delivering a different answer.
Resilience Revealed by Industry Data
At the 95th International Wool Textile Conference, Sun Ruizhe, president of the China National Textile and Apparel Council (CNTAC), disclosed that from January to April 2025, revenue of large-scale textile enterprises edged down 0.3% year-on-year, but total profit surged 19.3%, with a profit margin of 2.9%. This contrast clearly indicates that the industry is shifting from scale expansion to efficiency-driven growth.
During the same period, retail sales of garments, shoes, hats, and knitwear by units above designated size totaled 512.13 billion yuan, up 8.1% year-on-year, with growth accelerating by 5 percentage points from the previous year. The recovery in end-consumption has provided stable order support for upstream fabric and yarn segments. However, investment data showed structural divergence: fixed asset investment in the textile sector grew 10.8%, while that in apparel and chemical fiber sectors fell 10.3% and 14.5% respectively. This implies that capital is concentrating on high-value-added links such as smart manufacturing and green dyeing, while expansion in traditional processing segments has notably weakened.
Dual Reshaping Forces: Digital and Green
Under the smart economy paradigm, productivity leaps are no longer a distant vision. Jiangsu Yueda Textile's 'Lighthouse Factory', through smart manufacturing, reduced labor per 10,000 spindles by about 70%, quadrupled overall labor productivity, lowered unit energy consumption by 15%, and cut processing costs by 26%. Semir Group's AI-assisted design system boosted overall design efficiency by 35% and pattern design efficiency by over 200%. Behind these figures lies the fact that the industry's key link digitalization rate has reached 63.2%, higher than the national manufacturing average.
Green technology penetration is also accelerating. Large-scale application of non-aqueous dyeing and digital printing is rewriting the traditional high-water-consumption, high-pollution image of printing and dyeing. In 2024, the number of textile enterprises listed in the 5G factory directory reached 30, with industrial internet platforms beginning to cover the entire process from spinning to garment. For buyers, this means more controllable delivery times, more stable quality, and more transparent carbon footprints.
New Opportunities in Export Structure Shift
From January to May 2025, total textile and apparel exports reached 116.73 billion US dollars, up a marginal 0.1% year-on-year. But structural divergence is significant: textile exports (semi-finished goods) grew 1.7% to 59.48 billion US dollars, while apparel exports fell 1.6% to 57.24 billion US dollars. The sustained growth of intermediate goods exports reflects China's strengthening 'hub' role in the global supply chain—fabric and yarn competitiveness remains robust, while garment processing faces substitution pressure from Southeast Asia.
Dalang's case precisely validates this point. As a global wool knitwear sourcing hub, its annual garment output of over 900 million pieces largely relies on high-count wool and cashmere blends, exported to European and American markets through digital fast-response supply chains. This combination of 'fabric + manufacturing + fast response' is becoming the core barrier for foreign trade firms against order volatility.