China's Clothing Industry Needs More Such Billionaires

Yang Minde, chairman and CEO of Yida group

If you wear clothes and drink water, then the story has something to do with you.

It is very likely that at least one of the clothes you wear today is made in China. Statistics from the national development and Reform Commission show that China Textile industry In the first three months of this year, 1 trillion and 240 billion yuan worth of clothing was produced.

Since reform and opening up in 1978, China has developed into the largest in the world. Clothing production Country. China's textile industry has proved to be an important source of low skilled jobs, which has made countless workers, most of them women, free themselves from poverty. However, the disadvantage of the industry is that it has caused serious damage to China's domestic and overseas environment.

According to the 2010 China Environmental Statistics Yearbook, textile manufacturers discharge more than 2.5 billion tons of waste water in China every year, ranking fourth in 39 main industries. As we all know, many factories have repeatedly violated China's environmental regulations, because the penalties and fines for doing so are relatively weak.

Consumers may also be surprised to learn that pollutants remain in the fibers of the clothes they buy. Greenpeace (Greenpeace) has proved that washing cheap textiles from China will release toxic chemicals to rivers, lakes and oceans around the world.

What is even more disturbing is that dozens of International fashion brands They have never turned a blind eye to the despicable habits of their suppliers. A recent issue of Cleaning up the Fashion Industry, published by five environmental groups in mainland China, found that 48 fashion brands have been purchasing their products from factories that pollute the environment. When the evidence was presented to these fashion brands, more than 2/3 of the brands ignored their request to rectify their supply chain.

The report has several willing to manage the supply chain in a more positive way. brand Praise was given. They include Adidas (Adidas), Burberry (Burberry), Gap, H&M, Levi's (Levi) s, Nike, WAL-MART, and especially IDA (Esquel).

Yang Minde, chairman of Yida group recently pointed out: "many companies say that environmental protection is expensive, but I do not agree with that." As a guest speaker invited by the UC Rusal President s Forum at the Advanced Research Institute of Hong Kong University Science & Technology, Yang Minde described how the Yida group inspected its businesses carefully during the lecture in May, and adopted a series of new methods to reduce its annual water consumption by 50% and electricity consumption by 40%. The savings are currently being invested in better equipment and technology.

Yida group is headquartered in Hongkong, where Yang Minde manages more than 54 thousand employees. It produces about 100 million cotton shirts every year for brand customers such as Hugo Boss, also known as Boss, Marks & Spencer, Nike, Ralph Lauren (Ralph Lauren), Tommy Hill Feig (Tommy Hilfiger) and so on.

Yang Minde said that all industries in China still have great potential to adopt existing environmental technologies. She has received a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a master's degree in Business Administration from Harvard University (MBA). She has been working with University researchers in various projects, such as finding alternatives to water in dyeing processes. Another idea she wants to explore is to use genomics sequencing technology to breed new cotton varieties so that they can be planted in more difficult environments, thereby slowing the competition between crops and cotton.

The performance of Yida group has been supporting Yang Minde's practice. Over the past five years, the revenue of the privately held company has more than doubled to $1 billion 200 million. Her family, including her sister, vice president Yang Minxian of Yida group, has a net worth of $1 billion, making the pair rank thirty-seventh in the 40 richest list in Hongkong.

Since its establishment 10 years ago, Esquel-Y.L. Yang Education Foundation has funded renovation and renovation of more than 20 schools in rural areas of Xinjiang. The Yida group has cotton growing, spinning and cotton rolling operations there. In recent years, the foundation has also invested more resources to introduce a series of new courses to the education system there, such as health education, Lego robotics and children's computer programming education software Scratch developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology media laboratory.

"If you ask us what the contribution of Yida is, it's not how many schools we built in Xinjiang, but how many high-quality jobs we can create," Yang Minde said. "If you can't create remunerated job opportunities, you will not fulfill your responsibilities in market capitalism."

High quality employment opportunities are a core value of Yida group, which emphasizes cultural diversity and emphasizes equality between men and women. The company recruited Uygur graduates from Xinjiang as a future leader of the company. In addition, a large number of important managerial positions of the company are currently held by female employees. Yang Minde said: "in the Yida group, we never lack leadership."