The aftermath of the epidemic has not subsided and the season has changed. More and more people are visiting shopping malls. Many stores have launched discounts as powerful as Double Eleven. Among them, the discounts on clothing categories are the most attractive. In order to stimulate shopping, some merchants have offered 20% off discounts, some fashion brands have discounts on almost all products in the store, and brands that usually have tough prices have also lowered their prices.
Overseas, under the anxiety of the epidemic, some clothing brand stores announced temporary closure. In mid-to-late March, clothing brands Levi’s, Uniqlo, H&M, and Zara successively announced the temporary closure of their stores in Europe and the United States.
The apparel industry is one of the industries hardest hit by the COVID-19 epidemic. According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics, total retail sales of clothing, footwear and hats categories decreased by 30.9% year-on-year from January to February 2020. Considering that people generally have the habit of buying new clothes during the Spring Festival, the main reason for the decline in consumption can only be the epidemic.
In fact, the epidemic not only affects shopping, but also is a disaster for the entire clothing industry chain, falling on the bosses and workers in the chain. Guangdong, Zhejiang, Fujian and other clothing trade gathering places are the first to bear the brunt.
The butterfly effect of the epidemic
Baohua is a private knitting company in Fujian The factory’s pattern makers, whose garments are eventually exported to Europe, America and Japan. According to her, on February 11, the first month after the factory resumed operations, orders and supply were basically sufficient. Workers worked 12 hours a day, often working overtime until after 10 p.m.
There has been less overtime work recently. During the Qingming Festival, the factory gave them two days off, one day more than in previous years.
Also decreasing are wages. Baohua said her salary includes piece-rate wages, bonuses, downtime fees, clock-in fees and overtime allowances. The downtime fee for waiting for materials has been reduced from the original 24 yuan/day to 12 yuan/day, the clock-in fee has been reduced from 1.5 yuan/hour to 1 yuan/hour, and the overtime subsidy has been reduced from 2.5 yuan/hour to 1.5 yuan/hour. With these three changes alone, wages can be hundreds less than before. In the county town, the monthly salary of female workers is usually around 3,000 yuan.
Affected by the Sino-US trade war and rising tariffs, the factory’s orders began to decrease last year. Coupled with the increase in labor costs in recent years, the factory’s efficiency continues to be sluggish.
On March 11, workers were processing clothing products in a clothing factory
“In the factory The original manager gave up and went to Vietnam,” Baohua said. The factory has been laying off employees one after another. This year, more than 20 logistics employees have been laid off, which is the highest concentration in the past two years.
Kangle Village in Guangzhou is an urban village inhabited by many Guangpiao people, and is home to thousands of workshops that produce garments. In March, the clothing workshops here resumed production one after another, and a number of merchants held small blackboards on the street to recruit workers and find customers.
Ms. Shi runs a small workshop here with 10 workers. According to her experience, February to May is the peak season, but the number of orders has decreased this year. More than half. Since returning to work 10 days ago, she has been in a situation of “short of people for the first two days and lack of orders for the next two days.”
A foreign trade fashion company in Dongguan issued an announcement and was forced to suspend work and production, saying that due to the impact of the foreign epidemic, new orders had not increased, and original production orders were canceled or suspended at the request of customers. After the shutdown, employees could only receive basic living expenses and had to fall into a state of semi-employment.
There are many companies with similar orders that have gone wrong. The epidemic is a force majeure, and it is understandable to cancel and postpone orders. However, the costs and risks behind the raw materials that have arrived at the factory, changing routes, rising freight, and returned goods are still overwhelming some small and medium-sized enterprises.
Guangzhou Kangle Village
Fa Cheng built a factory in Jinjiang, the shoe city, and originally built a factory for Nike, Adidas, Anta, Xtep and other brands produce trademark parts. From March to May, he should have cooperated with the company to prepare intensively for the Canton Fair scheduled to be held in April. The latter is known as the “wind vane” of China’s foreign trade international trade fair. But now, he contacted The foreign trade apparel factories are relatively quiet.
Sportswear is regarded as a “safe haven” for the apparel industry. However, the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, originally scheduled to be held in July this year, has been postponed for one year, and many foreseeable sports events will be postponed. Affected, even the safe havens of leading companies are not immune.
With less demand, clothes cannot be sold. In order to reduce the backlog of inventory, there are fewer new orders put into the production line. The epidemic knocked over the first domino and spread the impact from the purchase end to the production line end.
Data from the General Administration of Customs shows that from January to February, the total export volume fell by 15.9% compared with the same period last year, and the export reduction rate of textiles, clothing, shoes and other categories exceeded 18%. %, tens of millions of clothing companies are involved.
According to the National Bureau of Statistics, in February, the national unemployment rate increased from the previous month, reaching 6.2%. (Based on the number of working people in 2018, it was about 50 million, equivalent to the permanent population of two Shanghai cities. In February last year, this number was 5.3%, and the unemployment rate for the whole of 2019 reached 3.6%.<It may still be difficult to fully recover from the epidemic, but the attempt at the online Canton Fair can still be seen as a rehearsal and adaptation to prepare for normalized cloud transactions after the market is reborn.
The epidemic will not end globalization, but it will change it. It can be optimistically foreseen that every striver in the industrial chain will have enough resilience to adapt to new changes and create new ones. Advantage.
Survival of the fittest is regarded as the natural law of the market, which is so cruel that it is almost ruthless. However, the epidemic has made us further reflect, or provided another idea: industrial agglomeration and chainization, perhaps It is more resilient and less likely to be replaced than transferring low-end industries and upgrading high value-added industries.
However, economic and industrial resilience does not necessarily contradict globalization. If a country has the ability to reorganize its manufacturing industry in a short period of time to cope with sudden crises, it does not have to sacrifice its Globalization, at the expense of higher production costs. Global supply chains will always be more resilient and cost-effective than one country’s self-sufficiency.
This truth has long been written in the classics of our ancestors: one arrow is easy to break, but ten arrows are difficult to break; a single thread cannot make a thread, and a single tree cannot make a forest.
This is true for industries, it is true for a country, and it is true for the whole world. </p
