Study On The International Competitiveness And Regional Brand Strategy Of China's Apparel Industry

The Apparel Industry of China has made considerable progress since China's reform and opening-up. Right now, it's on the shift from the "diversification & integration " stage to the "volume to value "stage. At the new stage, customers will prefer fashion and quality to low price of apparel, design & brand will take the place of costing and become the key competitive advantages. What's more, the quota on global trade of textile and apparel is gradually canceled, which provides an unprecedented opportunity as well as challenges for the development of China's apparel industry. How to grasp the opportunity and deal with the challenge is a hot problem now, and I want to give some study on it.In my study, the international competitiveness of apparel industry is more than the resource advantage or the large market share. It is should be an integrated ability which bring out profit not only at present, but also in the future. To formulate the competitiveness, Regional Brand Strategy instead of Costing Strategy will be the best choice. Then, I give an example by using a case study that's "the Regional brand of apparel industry in Ningbo city". The frame of my study is as below. Firstly, from the development and the trends in China and the world, we can see clearly that China's apparel industry has the conditions and the needs to upgrade. Secondly, using the "evaluating model on the international competitiveness of China's industry", we get the conclusion as follows: on one hand, China's apparel products have the strong market-dominated ability, on the other hand, we have theweakness in the future global competition, we must change the competition strategy aside from the cost and price. The current cost advantage of our apparel industry is reducing and facing the lower manufacturing cost in the countries like Pakistan and Indonesia. What's more, the brand innovation center is still in the hands of some advanced countries. We need the world famous brand to enhance the value-added in our apparels.At last, enlightened by the case study on building the regional brand in Ningbo's apparel industry, I suggest that the regional brand strategy of China apparel industry substitute the cost strategy. It's true that one single apparel enterprise has many difficulties and no possibility to build a world brand. But there are many apparel clusters, and some of them are trying to build regional brand. We can cooperate with all the apparel enterprises within a region to build a famous regional brand in the world. The regional government and the enterprise should attend in and cooperate in the play. The government take it's role by doing things from the macroscopical level, such as the orientation of the regional brand, the regional web building, the apparel human resource training, etc. The enterprise should do some things like enhancing the apparel quality, improving the innovation ability, and strengthening the information construction. Besides, Outsourcing is a good way for the enterprises to do job professionally, which can boost the cooperation and specialization between the corporations in the region. All these suggestions can help a apparel region to build a famous brand in the world, and then stimulate the competitive advantage and win the ability to get the persistent profit in the global competition.