South China's Pearl River Delta may be losing out to the relatively new and more aggressive factories in the Yangtze River Delta in the country's inter-regional competition.
According to Zheng Chen'ai, chairman of the local fashion association of Wenzhou, a Yangtze River Delta city, and chairman of Zhejiang Aobenni Garment Co Ltd, there are clear signs of the shift.
Many export-oriented garment manufacturers in Wenzhou have succeeded in grabbing production orders from companies based in the Pearl River Delta, he reported.
Aobenni is now the exclusive manufacturer for a number of brands which were previously produced in factories in the Pearl River Delta. These brands account for 30 percent of the total orders Aobenni has received.
The trend is happening "not only in the garment and footwear industries, but other labor-intensive industries as well," Zhou Qizheng, a municipal economic official of Wenzhou, told the Beijing-based Economic Observer. Nor is the trend limited only to one or two cities, Zhou reported.
The major difference between the two regions is that in the Pearl River Delta, many companies do not own factories or other assets. It is easy for them to flee the market in a crisis and the orders they left behind are picked by others. However, in the Yangtze River Delta, more companies have their own factories and their own sales networks, Zhou said.
