ADVERTORIAL
Smart clothing is the way forward
Taiwan-based TexRay Group is into global vertically-integrated textile manufacturing covering Asia, North America and Africa. It owns four subsidiary companies as well. Tony Lin, Jason Lu and Angel Peng of TexRay talk to Fibre2Fashion about the need for investment in the R & D department.
Tony Lin
Manager, R & D & Marketing Department
Jason Lu
Senior Specialist, Marketing Division
How does your supply chain network work? Which regions of the world are part of your supply chain? TexRay has three main manufacturing bases in different continents. In Asia, we have a vertically-integrated set-up in Yancheng, China, with knitting, yarn dyeing and garment manufacturing facilities. The other base is in Mexico, which is a strategic one as it helps deliver quick customer orders of the US market on time. The set-up has knitting, yarn dyeing, dyeing, finishing and garment manufacturing units. We have all kinds of facilities, including spinning, at our manufacturing base in Swaziland, which is a duty-free production site and helped exports to the United States. But as Swaziland lost the African Growth Opportunity Act( AGOA) benefit three years back, we had to turn our export business into one for regional production covering the south African zone.
We also have factories in Lesotho, Jordan, Cambodia and Vietnam. The latest garment factory was established in 2016 in Long An, Vietnam. We also have different factories in Taiwan, not wholly owned by TexRay. The yarn dyeing factory in Tainan is fully owned by TexRay and it is the first factory that we started in 1978.
In the beginning, we did suffer losses due to the shut-down of the export business. But in the last two years, our business in the domestic market is doing well. We saved many jobs.
It is tough for any company to run a vertically-integrated textile business in Taiwan. We have a yarn dyeing division for the last 40 years here.
How do you manage to monitor activities in all three diverse locations from Taiwan? For monitoring the production and sales numbers, we have an internal network and we also use enterprise resource planning( ERP) along with different communication tools. Besides that, we also have monthly meetings to discuss strategies and business plans.
Which brands and retailers are you currently associated with? It is a little complicated in our business since the process is segmented into divisions like yarn dyeing, fabric making, and garment manufacturing. Garment manufacturing is the main business for TexRay. The ratio of all the three verticals garmenting, fabric making and yarn dyeing is 6:3:1. The different offices at TexRay have different buyers. We are associated with sportswear brands, such as Under Armour, Nike, Adidas, Fila, and Columbia, along with other athleisure and fashion forward brands.