France is playing a leading role in pressing the EU to act against imports of Chinese textiles, but a French clothing company is showing how it is possible to survive and prosper by exporting to China.
The family company, La Bonneterie Cevenole company, based in the Ardeche region of southern France, specializes in up-market Montagu brand shirts made from an artificial fiber known as polyamide, and exports 80 percent of its 750,000 annual production to China, explained chief executive Pierre Gros.
The very rich
"Today in Europe, people buy Chinese clothing products, because they prefer to spend their money on telecommunications or overseas holidays, while in China, there is a category of very rich people who want to buy imported products even if they are expensive," Gros said.
La Bonneterie Cevenole, established in 1929, made a key strategic move in the 1970s with an early entry into China using a clever marketing strategy even though it could not legally sell its products inside the country.
Pierre Gros, during a trip to Hong Kong in the 1970s at the age of 24, was struck by the uniformity of the clothing and the intense curiosity of the Chinese about Western culture.
Billboard beginnings
"We realized that China could become a market and we had an idea to do advertising there, even though we didn't have the right to sell in China," Gros said.
For "almost nothing," and before the opening of the Chinese market, the company bought large billboard advertising spaces in railway stations and key locations in Guangzhou and Shanghai as well as television advertisements in Hong Kong and Macau.
"A lot of people live in Hong Kong and go back every year to visit their families in [mainland] China taking back presents, jeans or cigarettes. Our strategy at the time was to make the Montagu shirt part of the presents carried back by visitors," Gros said.
The campaign proved successful and company, which then had 20 stores in Hong Kong, saw its sales multiply.
"The market opened little by little, first in Hong Kong, then after four or five years with normal merchandise trade" the rest of China, Gross said.
Quality
Gros is not pessimistic about the future of the French textile industry because "France has an image of high-quality."
He said: "The Chinese want to buy French products which stand out from what they can buy at home."
However, the successful French exporter called for a "fairer treatment" by China where the tax on European clothing products is 14 to 17 percent compared to 5 percent in Europe.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest foundry service provider, yesterday said that global semiconductor revenue is projected to hit US$1.5 trillion in 2030, after the figure exceeds US$1 trillion this year, as artificial intelligence (AI) demand boosts consumption of token and compute power. “We are still at the beginning of the AI revolution, but we already see a significant impact across the whole semiconductor ecosystem,” TSMC deputy cochief operating officer Kevin Zhang (張曉強) said at the company’s annual technology symposium in Hsinchu City. “It is fair to say that in the past decade, smartphones and other mobile devices were
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS