NANNING, Dec. 20 (Xinhua) — As startling as it could appear, one in each 5 processed duck feathers worldwide at this time comes from Qiaoxu, a once-obscure township in south China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region that has remodeled into a world hub for the feather and down trade, fueled by speedy improvement and a thriving entrepreneurial spirit.
The feather and down trade in Qiaoxu dates again to the Eighties, when duck feathers had been largely considered nugatory by locals, till astute businessmen from coastal areas noticed them as worthwhile uncooked supplies for garment manufacturing.
“My grandfather used to ride his bicycle with two baskets, collecting duck feathers door to door,” recalled Yu Ke, normal supervisor of a neighborhood down and feather firm. At that point, Yu mentioned, feathers had been so cheap {that a} handful of candies may very well be traded for a big pile of them.
As extra individuals joined the commerce of shopping for and promoting duck feathers, Qiaoxu progressively grew to become a buying and selling hub for uncooked duck feathers by the early Eighties.
When locals realized that true profitability lay within the down — the gentle layer beneath the feathers — they started exploring methods to separate it from the feathers, quite than merely accumulating uncooked supplies, in accordance with Yu.
He famous that many household workshops sprang up throughout the township, with individuals accumulating duck feathers by day and sorting them by evening, earlier than promoting them to garment producers in Zhejiang, Jiangsu and Guangdong provinces.
By the late Nineteen Nineties, Qiaoxu was house to over 90 processing factories, changing into a key provider to main garment producers in China’s coastal areas.
Since 2000, many household workshops have remodeled into trendy enterprises by incorporating superior washing and deep-processing gear, enabling the manufacturing of completely cleaned and disinfected merchandise.
Today, the feather and down trade is the spine of Qiaoxu’s financial system, with the city processing roughly 90,000 tonnes of such supplies yearly. This accounts for 28 % of China’s complete manufacturing and 18 % of the worldwide market.
The township is now house to round 150 processing enterprises, using over 30,000 individuals. In 2023, the entire output worth of Qiaoxu’s feather and down trade reached practically 2.3 billion yuan (about 320 million U.S. {dollars}), with cross-border gross sales exceeding 1.1 billion yuan.
Qiaoxu has quickly expanded its feather and down trade into world markets. Around 40 % of the township’s washed feather and down uncooked supplies at the moment are imported from Southeast Asian international locations like Thailand, Vietnam and Malaysia, additional enhancing its world provide chain.
Local enterprises have additionally made important strides in exporting completed merchandise. For occasion, Yu’s firm was one of many pioneers, exporting down merchandise to Japan as early because the Nineteen Nineties.
“In early October, we exported 50,000 sets of down products to European and American countries, and we’re now working on completing new export orders,” mentioned Yu, including that the corporate’s duvets and down pillows are bought the world over.