Fabric sales in Keqiao in China’s Zhejiang province and the world-leading hub for textile production and trading jumped 57.38 per cent in March, on the previous month, to 509 million metres, due to the seasonal factor. Trading volume was up 2.22 per cent y-o-y, too.

In the first quarter of 2016, the like-for-like trading volume expanded 3.34 per cent to 1.22 billion metres, while sales revenue increased 10.36 per cent, against the same period of the last year, to US$18bn.

The much higher growth rate of sales revenue was attributable mainly to the closures of dyeing mills in Keqiao, pushing up the dyeing costs dramatically. To tackle the thorny issue of pollution before the G20 Hangzhou Summit in September 2016, the local governments of Zhejiang province have shut down nearly 100 dyers in Shaoxing, one-third of the total, after the Spring Festival.

Meanwhile, the move from the government firstly prompted the mills to use more high-quality dyes. As a consequence, quotations for Disperse Black ECT 300 per cent, the key product, jumped around 65 per cent in March, to 28,000 Yuan per tonne in early April. The Reactive Black WNN 200 per cent traded at 27,000 Yuan per tonne on 1 April, soaring 50 per cent during the earlier month.

The closures of dyers boosted the confidence of the leading firms of the sector to raise their service fee by around 15 per cent, as employees had to work overtime every day after the Spring Festival.