Sport apparel manufacturer Suzhou Tianyuan Garments is the first Chinese garment maker to have located in the US. The company opened a production facility in Arkansas and will invest more than $20 million and create 400 jobs.
The Chinese company purchased a 100,000 sq. ft, building within minutes of rail, waterway and air transportation to get Arkansas-produced goods to the market. Suzhou has a manufacturer’s production rate of nearly 10 million articles of clothing.
The clothing mill will mainly supply Adidas, which is the world’s second-largest sporting goods conglomerate behind Nike. At the end of 2017, Suzhou Tianyuan supplied 90 per cent of the garments marketed by Adidas. The Chinese garment market also manufactures clothing for sporting equipment giant Reebok and Giorgi Armani, the high-end Italian brand now based in New York City.
The clothing manufacturer will join India-based Welspun Tubular and the Danish LM Wind Power as key overseas industrial prospects that Arkansas was able to attract to one of the state’s largest industrial parks. For the year, Arkansas manufacturers have added 4,100 jobs, boosting the total number of blue-collar jobs in the sector to 1,60,300. The state wants to bring manufacturing jobs back to the US.
