Although the quota system on imports of clothing and textiles from China expires at year-end, we won’t see any rush of retail buyers flocking off to China on a new purchase spree, according to Brian Brink, executive director of the Textile Federation. The demise of the quota system was “well telegraphed”, he told FTW. “When the system was launched it was pointed out that it would last two years, and expire on December 31, 2008. “Those who wanted to source goods from China, or re-connect with their original sources there, would have done that months ago.” With the end of quotas, Brink assumes that China will probably resume its dominance of the market. Not that the Chinese quota system was all that effective in saving the local industry from cheap imports. Brink suggested that it was “only partially successful”. It basically did little more than cause SA buyers to switch to other cut-price sources like Bangladesh and Vietnam, for example. He also suspected that there was a lot of back-door trading in Chinese-manufactured goods anyway, with strange sources appearing on bills of lading. “Places like the Solomon Islands,” Brink said, “which I wouldn’t have thought would be a source of much else apart from coconuts.”
