COTTON USA Mark Internationalization
The COTTON USA Mark Internationalization initiative capitalizes on the increased globalization of the world textile industry. Mark Internationalization preserves the requirement that qualifying products be made of 100 percent cotton and at least 50 percent U.S. cotton, but enables a qualifying product produced in one country to be promoted for sale in another. For example, products produced in Indonesia from U.S. cotton can be included in promotions in Japan.
This initiative expands the number of goods and volume of U.S. cotton that can benefit from CCI’s Mark licensing and advertising programs. This is particularly true in certain developed markets such as Europe and East Asia, where per capita consumption of cotton textiles is high but cotton usage and inputs at the domestic mill level have declined due to increasing labor and capital costs. In many of these markets, imported, semi-processed and processed textiles from lower-wage countries now claim a large share of the cotton textiles sold at retail.
As the textile industry becomes more global, decision-making on product and input sourcing has become more centralized. The Japanese textile complex epitomizes this situation, where Japanese-controlled spinning capacity offshore has risen to 80 percent of that retained in Japan. More noteworthy, while consumption of cotton in Japan has declined to under 1 million bales per year, consumption of cotton by Japanese-owned mills abroad has eclipsed the Japanese domestic consumption.
An example of this pattern is Shikibo, a COTTON USA licensee based in Japan who produces textiles offshore. Despite Shikibo’s significant level of offshore production, decisions on raw material sourcing come from the company’s headquarters in Japan. Shikibo has licensed and labeled with the COTTON USA Mark the products it manufactures offshore (such as in Indonesia)
to sell in Japan where CCI maintains a strong COTTON USA consumer promotion program.
