While the industry remains anxious about overcapacity and price wars, Wujiang's textile sector has already offered its answer through a high-level promotion meeting: stop competing on scale, start competing on value creation. On August 6, Jiangsu Province held its promotion meeting for characteristic advantageous textile industries in Wujiang, with six leading local enterprises, including Hengli, Shenghong, and Taihu Xue, as well as the National Innovation Center for Advanced Functional Fibers, all in attendance. The signal is clear: under favorable policies for private enterprises, the next phase for textiles is not capacity expansion but profits driven by high-end, intelligent, and green development.
Background
Wujiang is one of the regions with the highest density of textile industries in China, with a complete chain from chemical fiber and weaving to silk products. However, this also means the pain of homogeneous competition is felt earlier and more intensely. Tang Junsong, general manager of Shenghong Chemical Fiber New Materials, openly stated at the meeting that homogeneous competition is intensifying—not a cliché, as when most enterprises compete on prices of conventional products, profit margins are compressed to the limit.
The core agenda of the meeting was to clarify the path toward high-end, intelligent, and green development. For Wujiang enterprises, this is both a policy direction and a survival need. Zhao Jinguang, general manager of Hengli Chemical Fiber, gave a representative statement: the company will focus on breakthroughs in advanced fiber materials and deepen digital transformation of smart factories. This indicates that leading enterprises are reallocating resources from capacity expansion to building technological barriers.
Notably, Hu Yufang, chairwoman of Taihu Xue Silk, mentioned integrating traditional silk reeling techniques with modern functional fiber technologies and leveraging AI for creative design and flexible production. This trend suggests that Wujiang's textile upgrade is not a complete overhaul but rather superimposing digital intelligence on existing foundations, allowing time-honored brands to develop new growth curves.
Industry Impact
From an industrial belt perspective, Wujiang's breakthrough path offers reference for similar clusters nationwide. Chemical fiber leaders like Hengli and Shenghong are extending into new materials, essentially transforming upstream raw material scale advantages into technological ones. Meanwhile, silk enterprises such as Taihu Xue, Shangjiakai, and Huajia focus on branding and high-value-added products, aiming to establish differentiated consumer perceptions. This pattern of upstream-downstream synergy and stratified breakthroughs precisely addresses the biggest pain point in the textile industry: thin margins in midstream and weak bargaining power at both ends.
For buyers, the transformation of Wujiang enterprises implies a subtle shift in supply structure. In the past, purchasing conventional fabrics may have been price-driven, but in the future, suppliers with R&D capabilities in functional fibers or digital flexible production will be more likely to offer premium space in lead times, quality, and customization services. Huajia Silk's emphasis on high-quality, high-value-added products and Jingyi Special Fiber's commitment to the air-jet vortex spinning niche both signal to buyers: supplier selection criteria should shift from "low price" to "technology fit."
Continued policy support is also noteworthy. The meeting's release of favorable signals for private enterprises directly boosts the private-dominated textile industry. However, it is crucial to recognize that policy dividends do not automatically translate into competitiveness—what truly determines victory is the execution efficiency in R&D investment, digital transformation, and brand building. Whether Wujiang enterprises can first run this model will affect the upgrade pace of the entire Yangtze River Delta textile belt.