The textile industry in China is the largest in the world in overall production, exports and retail, with an output of 58 million tons a year in the fiber categories alone, accounting for more than 50 percent of the world’s total; with textile and garment exports of $316 billion, accounting for more than a third of global shipments, and a retail scale of more than $672 billion, with online retailing of about $298.9 billion.

Behind these figures is China’s massive textile industry supply. Its success is based on a solid foundation and ongoing innovation, developing new technologies and green strategies, understanding global and local industry trends, and extensive investment in R&D, consumer-oriented personalization and flexible production.

China has ranked as the world’s largest manufacturer for 11 consecutive years since 2010 and is the only country playing a major role in all industrial categories. According to data from the Chinese Academy of Engineering, five of China’s 26 manufacturing industries are at the world’s most advanced level, with the textile industry helping to lead the way

From cotton to fiber, from weaving and dyeing to garment production, a piece of garment undergoes hundreds of processes before it reaches the consumer.So even today, the textile industry is a typical labor-intensive industry. China, as the world’s largest producer of cotton, has a thousand-year history of textile production and has been providing the world with a constant supply of cheap and qualitative clothing thanks to its demographic characteristics, a strong labor force and the opportunities created by reform and opening-up policies in the late ’70s, and especially China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001. But today the industry is also facing challenges, with increasing costs for labor and raw materials and mouesnting environmental prsure.So what is the industry’s strategy to stay ahead of the game? In the textile industry, the “number of workers per 10,000 spindles” has been an indicator of the number of employees needed in a spinning mill. More than 30 years ago, the standards were 1,000 in a spinning mill and 10,000 in fabric manufacturing. Today, with modern information technology, big data analysis, and modern management tools, only 35 workers are needed per 10,000 spindles.Digital transformation and upgrading not only greatly improved labor production efficiency in intelligent factories. In the warehouse of Bosideng, an intelligent scheduling system can locate a garment within three minutes in a warehouse of 1.5 million boxes of clothes, automatically attach a courier slip and transfer it to the transport vehicle. The throughput of the warehouse can reach up to one million pieces in a single day, with handling, sorting, distribution, counting and inventory all done by robots. The national sales data on the Bosideng’s big data platform is refreshed every six seconds delivering real-time market trend analysis. Through the digitalization of warehouses and logistics, Bosideng’s inventory turnaround time is 175 days shorter than that of its down apparel peers, for example Canada Goose’s 396 days and Moncler’s 278 days.