High End Market Grows in China, Volume Export Still Shows Gain
August 31, 2018
By ERIC SCHNEIDER
SHANGHAI — Activity at the Intertextile Fair at the National Expo Center demonstrates the ever-increasing appetite by Chinese buyers for high-end editeur lines.
High-end exhibitors like Designers Guild, JAB, and Zimmer + Rohde were in more abundance here than ever before. In addition, volume wholesalers like Morphrow are teaming up with high-end editeur lines to slake the growing designer and consumer thirst for the best imported products available outside of China for domestic consumption—price is no object.
As long as the import is not made by a Chinese mill, there is a demand for it among the 350 million millennials living in China, according to Hohans Cheung, president and owner of Morphrow, with 19 editeur lines on offer, including Blendworth’s Wedgewood. “We have product at $100 a meter that Chinese buyers are purchasing,” he says.
Morphrow saya he expects to open a new branch with warehouse in Hanoi, Vietnam, next year.
In the volume market, Chinese mills like Zhongwang, perhaps the largest mill in Hangzhou today, reports good business for exports to the United States but concern for American tariffs.
Most exporters here feel that US buyers will absorb a 10 percent duty, but 25 percent will be a real problem. Still, many feel the American buyers’ dependence on Chinese fabrics will not dramatically change, no matter what the customs duty will be.
SHANGHAI — Activity at the Intertextile Fair at the National Expo Center demonstrates the ever-increasing appetite by Chinese buyers for high-end editeur lines.
High-end exhibitors like Designers Guild, JAB, and Zimmer + Rohde were in more abundance here than ever before. In addition, volume wholesalers like Morphrow are teaming up with high-end editeur lines to slake the growing designer and consumer thirst for the best imported products available outside of China for domestic consumption—price is no object.
As long as the import is not made by a Chinese mill, there is a demand for it among the 350 million millennials living in China, according to Hohans Cheung, president and owner of Morphrow, with 19 editeur lines on offer, including Blendworth’s Wedgewood. “We have product at $100 a meter that Chinese buyers are purchasing,” he says.
Morphrow saya he expects to open a new branch with warehouse in Hanoi, Vietnam, next year.
In the volume market, Chinese mills like Zhongwang, perhaps the largest mill in Hangzhou today, reports good business for exports to the United States but concern for American tariffs.
Most exporters here feel that US buyers will absorb a 10 percent duty, but 25 percent will be a real problem. Still, many feel the American buyers’ dependence on Chinese fabrics will not dramatically change, no matter what the customs duty will be.
