Decide where to ask
Which country is actually deep in that cloth, and which origin keeps the duty preference for the garment’s destination.
Which country makes which cloth: the short version
Six countries, four kinds of cloth, and the two completely different reasons a country turns out to be cheap.
Read it instead
Which country should you buy your fabric from? Nobody publishes the answer. So we built it from free public data.
Capacity is the wrong question. A country can weave enormous quantities and sew every metre into its own garments.
So we asked what each country actually sells as cloth, and turned it into that country’s own export mix.
Six countries, four kinds of cloth, every row from one reporting year so the arithmetic holds.
Pakistan is famous for cotton. Seventy per cent of what it sells as cloth is bed and bath made ups, and almost none of it is knits.
Indonesia is a polyester country: fifty seven per cent of its cloth exports are woven synthetic filament.
Viet Nam is where the knits are. Thirty seven per cent, against under one per cent in Pakistan.
Then the part that turns a table into a prediction. A country is cheap for one of two completely different reasons.
India and China grow most of their own lint, so a cotton spike reaches them late. Bangladesh and Vietnam buy nearly all of theirs, so it lands on them at once.
The full table, all ten headings, the blends, and where every figure came from, is on the site.
Which country for which cloth: the decision
Nobody publishes a ranking of countries by fabric type, and we are not going to invent one. What is published is what each country actually sells as cloth, heading by heading, and whether it grows the cotton it weaves, and those two facts are enough to decide where to ask. The long version works this through for China, India, Turkiye, Pakistan, Viet Nam and Indonesia from what each reports to UN Comtrade, and sets them against the USDA cotton balance sheet, which also carries Bangladesh and has no row for Indonesia. The decision has three parts.
- Who is deep in your cloth. Each country’s own export mix says what that country is for. Ask in a country that is deep in your heading, because depth is a second quotation, a fallback when a mill is full, and a supplier who has run your construction before, and on a first order that is worth more than a small difference in rate.
- Pure or blended. A poly-cotton cloth is classified by whichever fibre predominates by weight, so the cotton-rich and the polyester-rich versions of the same blend sit in different chapters of the tariff and can carry different duty. Settle which side your construction falls on before you ask, and ask in a country whose woven cotton trade is a blended one, or you are a small order in a small department.
- Why that country is cheap. A country that grows most of its own lint feels a world cotton move late and softened; a country that buys nearly all its lint at the world price is selling you spinning and weaving and nothing else, so a cotton move lands on its quotation in full and at once. The long version prints the bought-in share for each of them.
Bangladesh files nothing to UN Comtrade, so neither export table has a row for it. Read from what its buyers report, it sells the finished article and not the cloth it was made from, so if a Bangladeshi supplier offers you fabric, ask where the fabric came from before you take the price.
What a bad answer looks like: “our own weaving” with no mill named, or a cloth origin that changes between the quotation and the invoice.
The long version, region by region, with both tables, the Bangladesh working and the cotton balance, is on the numbers page.
Tools for this step
- Seven supplier countries, side by side
Compare Pakistan, India, China, Bangladesh and the rest on wages, power reliability, currency, cost of money and the tariff they face, each figure stamped with its own year.
- Country cost indicators Excel
Take the whole origin comparison away as a sheet, with a reference year in its own column against every figure.
- Import duty on fabric
Read the base duty on your cloth, and check which side of the fifty per cent fibre line a blend falls, because it changes the chapter.
Every tool for this guide, grouped by what you are trying to do, is on the tools page.
