Wearing thin

Still, Wu says Conshing is constantly finding other ways to maintain its competitive edge. Some of the moves it has made to upgrade its operations include investing in 42 sets of advanced computer patterning and grading equipment that can create more than 200 paper patterns for production every month, and sewing equipment from Japan that can boost daily production capacity by up to 50,000 pieces.

The company is also focusing on tie-ups with overseas partners to push its products and designs to help expand the market for denim.

"We saw boom times from around 2003 to 2005, exporting a few million pairs of jeans to the US alone," Wu says. "That has changed after the financial crisis. But we are turning more toward the domestic market now."

Zhan Xueju, president of the Xintang Chamber of Commerce, agrees the township's businesses need to focus on improving the welfare of their workers as part of a maturing manufacturing sector.

"Businesses are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of ensuring the rights of workers, who may resort to extreme measures to vent their frustration if they feel they are mistreated," he says.

His comments follow the recent removal of two leading government and Party officials of Xintang after an incident of unrest in June. More than 200 migrant workers were involved in the unrest, which broke out after a pregnant migrant woman and her husband were injured in a dispute with a public security official on June 10.

Xintang's jeans producers also face problems such as inadequate regulations, standardization and management in ensuring the quality of their products, Zhan says.

"Right now, there are insufficient regulations to ensure the quality of all the products made by the thousands of businesses here," he says. "Just one runaway operator producing bad jeans can give us all a bad name and make it hard for the industry to upgrade into a high-quality, highly skilled sector."

Local businesses must also move away from being a "reactive" industry of waiting for orders from customers that they subsequently take a few months to fill, to becoming an "active" sector that sets the business agenda.

"We need to improve on our marketing, to sell Xintang and brand it as a hub for its jeans, so that we can take an active approach to sell our products and not just passively wait for clients to come to us," Zhan says.

To that end, efforts are already being made to increase the presence of the "Xintang" brand overseas, including the sponsorship of "brand ambassadors" to spread the township's strengths in jeans production worldwide.

"Taxation mechanisms must also be improved to better regulate the industry and weed out low-quality producers and help smaller businesses improve and move out of low-cost, low-returns manufacturing," Zhan says.

Jeans workshop owner Zhou Hexi agrees that more can be done to help small business owner like him.

"This line of work is becoming less and less lucrative. Hopefully we can all find a way out of this stagnation."