Why textiles &apparel exports grow much but fabric market so lackluster?

According to customs statistics, from January to May in 2025, the export value of China's textiles and apparel nationwide was 116.67 billion US dollars, a year-on-year increase of 1.0%. Among them, textile exports were 58.48 billion US dollars, a year-on-year increase of 2.5%; apparel exports were 58.2 billion US dollars, down 0.5% on the year. Although the amount of growth was not large, this year's exports still continued the situation of "price reduction and quantity increase". From January to May, the export volume of fiber-textiles and apparel increased by 13% year-on-year.

In addition, according to the statistics of the National Bureau of Statistics, the retail sales of domestic textiles and apparel from January to May this year increased by 3.3% year-on-year, continuing to show a moderate recovery trend.

However, from the perspective of the downstream fabric manufacturing industry, the operating pressure is relatively high this year, and the downstream orders and operating rate were significantly lower than the same period of last year. So why does the fabric manufacturing industry feel so bad this year? It is believed there may be the following three reasons.

First, in recent years, the fabric manufacturing industry has seen significant capacity expansion. Continuous production expansions occurred in 2017-2018, 2021, and 2023-2024. In particular, the capacity expansion of water-jet weaving in peripheral areas was particularly obvious, which has diluted the order quantity and order profits of individual enterprises, exacerbating industry involution.

Second, downstream customers of fabric manufacturing, such as fabric merchants or clothing enterprises, were controlling inventory, thereby reducing orders to fabric mills. The reason was that the high operating rate of the entire industry last year accumulated a large amount of inventory, and the inventory of each downstream link significantly increased at the end of last year, forcing the downstream players to control the rising speed of high inventory or even reduce inventory this year.