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The Trans Pacific Partnership may lower demand for some US textile exports. The TPP would allow western hemisphere apparel manufacturers to use yarn and fabric made anywhere in the TPP region and still enjoy preferential access to the US market. So many Vietnamese textile manufacturers could, at some future time, compete with US exporters in Mexico and Central America.
More than a third of US textile production is exported, mostly to western hemisphere nations. US textile manufacturers produce yarn, thread, and fabric for apparel, home furnishings, and various industrial applications. US manufacturers of industrial textiles may experience more direct competition from Japan, also a leading producer of industrial textiles.
TPP includes a yarn-forward rule of origin that would allow a garment to enter the US duty-free only if yarn production, fabric production, and cutting and sewing of the finished garment all occur within the TPP region. However, 187 fibers, yarns, and fabrics in short supply in TPP member countries could be sourced from outside the region, including China.
Products of western hemisphere nations have duty-free access to the US provided they incorporate US-made yarns and fabrics. However, TPP’s 11 non-US members would also have duty-free access to the US market for textiles and apparel.
A new report from technology consultancy Cientifica brings reveals how smart textiles are creating a fourth industrial revolution for the textiles and fashion industry. It is expected to be worth more than $130 billion by 2025. Cientifica founded as CMP Cientifica in Madrid in 1997 to meet advanced analytical needs of the European Space Agency, says the rapid adoption of smart textile technologies has the ability to make the current generation of wearables from Apple and Samsung quickly obsolete while providing significant opportunities in the sportswear market.
Instead of attaching a sensor to a garment, the sensor is increasingly the garment itself, providing significant opportunities in health and wellbeing, sports, medical monitoring, fashion and entertainment. The report tracks more than a hundred the leading companies in a sector predicted to show triple digit growth. It also examines issues ranging from data acquisition to energy storage and generation.
Advances in nanotechnology, organic electronics and conducting polymers are creating a range of textile-based technologies with the ability to sense and react to the world around. This includes monitoring biometric data such as heart rate and respiration, or environmental factors such as temperature and the presence of toxic gases. These textiles also have the ability to provide real time feedback in the form of haptic feedback, changes in color, temperature or electrical stimuli.
The report identifies third generation wearables as representing a significant opportunity for new and established textile companies to add significant value without having to directly compete with Apple, Samsung and Intel. The rise of textile wearables also represents a significant opportunity for manufacturers of the advanced materials used in their manufacture. Toray, Panasonic, Covestro, DuPont and Toyobo are said to be already suppling the necessary materials, while researchers are creating sensing and energy storage technologies, from flexible batteries to graphene super capacitors which will power tomorrows wearables. The report details the latest advances and their applications.
The 19th edition of Techtextil Symposium will be held in Germany, May 9 to 12, 2017. It will revolve around technical textiles, functional garment fabrics and their multifarious applications. Each area of application has specific requirements with regard to the properties and production of technical textiles. Textiles are the key to new solutions in fields such as architecture, medicine and safety.
Renowned experts will present latest research results as well as new products and applications. In addition to the proven lecture format, discussions and workshops will facilitate an active exchange of ideas for the first time.
The symposium permits an interactive debate about current problems and innovative visions of the future, and opens up new perspectives for participants. The focus of Techtextil Symposium will be on new developments, trends and potential areas of application for technical textiles and nonwovens. Emphasis will be given to both processing and new products. Special themes include apparel textiles, including smart textiles and wearables, bio materials, bio-degradable materials, printing technologies, such as 3D and digital printing, modern marketing tools for launching products onto the market and the internet of things with regard to textile machines and sustainability.
At Techtextil 2015, 34,000 trade visitors saw new products being shown by 1,389 exhibitors.
Fashion retailer H&M has supported the proposal of the European Commission to restrict 286 carcinogenic, mutagenic and reprotoxic (CMR) substances in textiles. But a number of trade bodies have raised objections to the plan. These bodies include Euro Commerce and the Foreign Trade Association among others. They fear that the fast-track process would not allow time for substitutions to be found and could lead to products being withdrawn from the marketplace.
But H&M sustainability business expert Ylva Weissbach has said that the proposals offered clear chemical legislation on textiles that would be beneficial to chemical management. The retailer does not object to the fast-track process so long as it is well-grounded and possible to implement.
H&M also supports recent amendments to the proposals. These aim to see the list of substances restricted in two phases with those that come into contact with skin restricted first. Weissbach said the suggested clarification of the scope to have a stepwise approach and to initially focus on products with skin contact was a reasonable approach.
Due to a lack of orders, the garment and textile industry in Vietnam will be hard pressed to achieve its export turnover target of $31 billion this year. Hence, the target needs to be lowered to $29 billion, observed Truong Van Cam, Deputy Chairman of Vietnam Textile and Apparel Association (VITAS). According to Cam, the current order shortage could result in the decade's lowest growth level of 4.3 per cent. In the first eight months of the year, export turnover of garment and textile products reached $18.7 billion thus meeting 64.5 per cent of the annual target.
Hung Yen Garment Joint Stock Corporation has 13 businesses with more than 14,000 labourers. The Corporation targeted an export turnover of $280 million but by the end of last month, it had only reached $160 million denoting a 10 per cent drop compared to that of last year.
Nguyen Xuan Duong, Chairman of the corporation's management board said that his firm had enough orders for this month. But in the by-gone years, the number of contracts at this time was usually enough for production until the end of the year. In addition, the exchange rate and salary policies have escalated the price by 2 to 4 per cent the textiles from other countries. Increasing production costs, limited orders and pressure by exporters to reduce selling prices have put a burden on the Corporation, Duong claimed.
He added that the exchange rate of the Vietnamese dong had not been adjusted for years, while the currencies of other countries were devalued by 18-20 per cent making their products 20 per cent cheaper than the Vietnamese ones. This, he said could be one of the reasons of orders coming down. Importers asked us to lower selling prices by 18-20 per cent, even 30 per cent. However, several still found partners from other countries, he said. Several other garment and textile firms have also received small orders until the end of the third quarter of the year.
Six Swedish companies, with new technologies will showcase their latest inventions at the ITMA ASIA + CITME 2016 show to be held in Shanghai from October 20-15. Most participating Swedish companies have attended ITMA Asia show from its inception as the show offers an excellent marketplace for making valuable business contacts with partners. Swedish textile machinery is known for a high level of technology, quality and reliability and has a high degree of automation and digitalization. With a high degree of automatization and digitalization, Swedish companies meet the demands of a rapidly changing Chinese textile industry. Eltex is a world leader in yarn break sensors and yarn tension monitors for textile machines. Its Eye compact yarn break sensor system for tufting eliminates the need for manual monitoring of yarn.
IRO is a market leader in production of high-tech yarn feeders. While Kinna is a leader manufacturing textile machinery for fully automated production of bed linen. Its pillow closing machine is designed to close the open end of the pillow using lock stitch. The machine has an output of nine pillows per minute.
ES Automatex Solution is a leading manufacturer of automated machines for home textile production.
Eton Systems is the inventor of the unit production system for material handling. The company offers flexible and unique solutions for apparel, home textiles and other light industries. Eton Systems support the industry with optimal utilization of space, increased production, shortened delivery time, improved quality and increased profitability.
Baldwin Jimek provides solutions for finishing, remoistening, and water or chemical management. The system has many advantages compared to traditional methods of applying process chemistry. Some of these are reduced consumption of chemistry and water, reduced waste of process chemistry and water, shorter drying times.
"The fast fashion trend of today is posing a challenge for the global dream of sustainable fashion. The millennial contemporary fashion is using up a vast amount of natural resources, thus making sustainable fashion a distant dream. With fast changing fashion trends becoming an integral part of modern life, the ecological footprint of the country is in many ways second only to oil and the statistics increasingly illustrate the threat looming large. In the US alone, 80 billion pieces of clothing are now purchased each year, 400 per cent more than just two decades ago."
The fast fashion trend of today is posing a challenge for the global dream of sustainable fashion. The millennial contemporary fashion is using up a vast amount of natural resources, thus making sustainable fashion a distant dream.
With fast changing fashion trends becoming an integral part of modern life, the ecological footprint of the country is in many ways second only to oil and the statistics increasingly illustrate the threat looming large. In the US alone, 80 billion pieces of clothing are now purchased each year, 400 per cent more than just two decades ago. In the UK, domestic clothing consumption increased from one million tons in 2010 to 1.1 million in 2015. Moreover, the average household owns around £4,000 worth of clothes, nearly a third of which hasn’t been worn for at least a year, meaning that UK consumers are hanging on to roughly £30 billion of unworn clothes reveals WRAP’s 2012 ‘Valuing Our Clothes’ report. In fact this is a trend world wide as fashion is becoming fast changing and far reaching.
Demand and availability of unused clothing pose a threat
The WRAP’s report also reveals that textiles accounts for five per cent of the UK’s total carbon and water footprints. Manufacture of textiles around the world and especially in the developing countries use up vast amounts of natural resources and often results in hazardous gases, pesticides and dyes being released into the environment. Adding to this the drastic increase in demand for fashion clothing and its availability appears to put pressure on end markets. In the UK, the amount of textiles collected for reuse and recycling increased nearly fivefold in the last 20 years, peaking at an estimated 650,000 tons in 2014.
While some of the markets have been struggling lately, some East African countries are considering banning the import of used clothing to their countries. Elaborating on the reason Cécile Martin, WRAP Technical Specialist in Textiles says for long there has been a debate about the impact of exported clothing on countries’ domestic industries, especially because Africa also receives first virgin goods from Asia, also of a lower quality, though WRAP has no official research on the impact.
However, serious effort is required for the clothing industry to become sustainable from end to end making production and design more resource-efficient, and phasing out dangerous chemicals, to ensuring clothing is more durable and has a sustainable outlet once the clothing is outdated for the first user.
WRAP announces Sustainable Clothing Action Plan (SCAP) initiative
To promote the concept of sustainable clothing WARP has put forth the Sustainable Clothing Action Plan (SCAP) and is forming the basis for a European-wide action plan on clothing, ECAP. A key part of SCAP’s work is focused on designing for durability as it would result in significant carbon, water, and waste reduction. WRAP has also introduced the ‘Sustainable Clothing Guide’, which provides tips on making clothing more durable – both in terms of physical attributes and emotional durability. The guide identifies the top five actions for eight key product categories: children’s clothing, occasion wear, knitwear, tailoring, denim, sportswear, casualwear and underwear. In other efforts WRAP’s extensive SCAP Knowledge Hub, offers different initiatives, processes and technologies that organizations could use in attempts to lessen their environmental impact.
China’s Xinao Textiles, is one of the world’s leading worsted spinners of wool, producing machine knitting yarns for the sweater, sports, outdoor, underwear and sock industries. The company has now opened an innovative knitwear development center in China.
The center comprises a research and development unit, which houses laboratories and small scale processing machinery in order to conduct experimental trials, a training and education department containing a 100-seat lecture theatre devoted to training future textile technologists, designers and engineers, and a fully equipped textile testing laboratory. Students will get hands-on training.
The operation and activities of the knitwear center will be overseen and guided by an advisory board. The advisory board comprises both international and Chinese experts, who have wide experience in a range of fields such as design, knitwear manufacturing, spinning, finishing, processing machinery and textile chemistry and dyeing.
The center is a result of close cooperation with The Woolmark Company along with other strategic partners from the design, textile machinery, textile chemicals industries, textile universities and leading knitwear companies. Xinao is engaged in the research, development, manufacture and sale of worsted yarn. The company’s main products include worsted yarn and intermediate products of wool tops, mainly used for downstream textile and clothing sectors.
Apollo Global Management, LLC and Nike have entered into a strategic partnership for an apparel supply chain in the Americas. This innovative partnership will increase regional manufacturing capabilities, enable quicker delivery of a more customized product to consumers and drive investment in sustainability.
Apollo Global Management, together with its consolidated subsidiary Apollo, is a leading global alternative investment manager with offices in New York, Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, Bethesda, Toronto, London, Frankfurt, Madrid, Luxembourg, Mumbai, Delhi, Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai. As of June 30, Apollo had assets worth $186 billion in private equity, credit and real estate funds invested across a core group of nine industries where Apollo has considerable knowledge and resources.
To establish the strategic partnership, a new apparel supply chain company has acquired the existing apparel suppliers in North and Central America and plans to invest in advancing its manufacturing operations and expertise to produce innovative, technical and customized apparel. In addition, this new company expects to acquire additional textile and apparel suppliers in the Americas in order to broaden and diversify its capabilities and product offerings. This will create a more vertically-integrated apparel eco system from materials suppliers and apparel manufacturers, to final embellishment, warehousing and logistics.
Apollo has announced that the new supply chain company has acquired two businesses to form the cornerstone of this strategy: the apparel manufacturer, New Holland, and the embellishment, warehousing and logistics operator, ArtFX. The investment is made by the Apollo-managed Special Situations I fund.
Nearly three months after being approved by the Cabinet, the textile package announced by the government in June awaits implementation in spirit. The special package involves a total outlay of Rs 6,000 crores aimed at improving competitiveness and generating jobs through a string of labour reforms. However, in apparel manufacturing, the specific sub-sector within textiles targeted by the package, hiring and production increase is yet to happen under the new norms.
As per sources the textile commissioner’s office is currently in consultation with stakeholders to iron out the difficulties in implementing the new norms. These include issues over wages, allowances and other statutory dues to be paid to workers. Also, the ministry has fixed overtime hours for workers not exceeding eight hours a week, in line with International Labour Organisation (ILO) norms. Manufacturers claim all this needs time to be incorporated in their operations. The package paved the way for fixed-term employment in apparel manufacturing looking at its seasonal nature.
While manufacturers have welcomed the move that will allow them to deal with excess demand and idle labour at different times of the year, workers have argued that it would affect their livelihood.
