The agreement on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) reached October 5 by a dozen Pacific Rim countries will affect the future of Taiwan's textile exports, hence the country's only viable strategy is to step up efforts to join the partnership, Premier Mao Chi-kuo said today at the weekly Cabinet meeting.
The premier, who made the remarks following the Ministry of Economic Affairs' (MOEA) briefing on the textile industry, assigned the National Development Council to oversee other ministries in their TPP preparations and to set up a timetable for the tasks.
Joining the TPP will require overcoming many obstacles and working on different fronts, Premier Mao noted. First, the administration must examine current laws and regulations and quickly align them with international norms. Second, the ROC must aggressively pursue bilateral pacts with members of the multilateral TPP.
Third, the government must step up communications with domestic businesses, as joining a trade bloc will inevitably bring losses to the more vulnerable industries such as agriculture. Meanwhile, the government must help businesses adjust and adapt to market liberalization. The Council of Agriculture has already done much in this regard, but it must also formulate relief and compensation measures as early as possible for the vulnerable sectors.
The premier pointed out that the textile industry in the past was primarily based on contract manufacturing. Globalization and rising production costs turned the industry to innovative ways of developing functional textile products that have helped sustain the industry's production value. This is a successful case of industrial transformation in a changing global environment, the premier noted.
In the future, the industry should not only apply technology to upstream raw materials to spur downstream growth; more importantly, it must develop raw materials with the consumer's needs in mind. Furthermore, it must pay attention to fashion trends in order to build a high-end niche market.
Taiwan's textile industry has always worked to develop technologically advanced functional fiber and fabric, the MOEA stated. Thanks to such efforts, the functional fabric sector has carved up 70 percent of the global market share. Taiwan must consolidate these advantages, expand applications to other fields and further develop its own brand. The designer centers and innovation bases islandwide can help businesses build self-owned brands and achieve small-scale yet diverse design and manufacturing. This will in turn assist the industry to transform itself while cultivating the talent needed for rapid design and pattern-making.
The MOEA's short-term measures are to promote marketing alliances among functional textile businesses and to strengthen the industry's position in the global supply chain. Concrete measures will include enhancing Taiwan's functional materials for value-added applications, facilitating collaboration with overseas brand manufacturers, promoting international exchanges on functional textile products, and boosting textile exports by matching domestic manufacturers to overseas brands.
The MOEA will also select businesses with a certain degree of automation and help them upgrade to digitized, autonomous manufacturing under the Productivity 4.0 plan. Guidance will also be provided to minimize production defect rates, raise quality and production efficiency, enable custom-made manufacturing, resolve worker shortages and raise the industry's global market share.