Textile Industry Association disclosed yesterday that in 2006 China textile machinery sales are expected to reach about US $8 billion.

From 2003, the annual demand in China’s textile machinery market basically remained at this level. However, the sales proportion of imported equipments and China-made equipments have changed, it is expected that the market share of China-made textile machinery will be less than 60 percent.

In the past few years, about 80 percent of the sales were of locally produced equipments in Chinese textile machinery market, which valued at $8 billion. But most China-made equipments occupied the mid and low-end markets, so the proportion of sales amount was less than 60 percent, while imported equipments took over 40 percent of the market sales.

In 2004, China imported $3.5 billion of textile machinery equipments, while the sales of Chinese-made textile machinery registered 36.997 billion yuan, exports amounted to $668 million.

In 2005, imports of equipments fell to $3 billion; sales of China-made textile machinery increased to 45.885 billion yuan, and exports stood at $887 million.

The ‘Eleventh Five-Year Plan’ of China’s textile industry stated that the industry-wide fiber processing capacity would be expanded to 36 million tons by the end of 2010. It also means that the absolute fiber increment per year would be of two million tons in the coming years.

In recent years, the annual growth rate of China’s cotton textile industry has been about 10 million spindles, of which, 400-500 million spindles are in middle and lower end sections.

From the second half of 2004, the state’s macro regulation and control of restrictive measures have been promulgated; they have significantly reduced the demand for the middle and lower ends textile machinery, meanwhile have promoted a rapid growth in high-grade equipment demand.