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May 19, 2005
The “Trouser Guy” Heads to Mexico and Vietnam
Bloomberg columnist Andy Mukherjee gets to the heart of the matter on the reimposition of quotas on cotton trousers imported from China:
Consulting firm A.T. Kearney estimates that it costs $135 to manufacture a dozen pairs of trousers in the U.S. The import price of Chinese trousers in the first quarter this year was $57 per dozen; a similar average for the rest of the world was $69.
Trouser manufacturing in the U.S. isn't just uncompetitive versus China. It's uncompetitive, period.
Capping Chinese exports won't help U.S. apparel makers. In 2003, when imports of Chinese-made trousers were limited by quotas to 1.6 percent of the total, 78 percent of the 200 million dozen cotton pants sold in the U.S. were still sourced from abroad--Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Hong Kong and Vietnam.
The “Trouser Guy,” first cousin of the “Sock Guy,” must be in Mexico or Vietnam right now.
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