Lubbock Times

Executives from one of the largest cotton yarn and fabric makers in the world visited Lubbock last week, hoping to expand its business relationship with growers in Texas.

Leaders from Texhong Textile Group, which says it purchases ten percent of the U.S. annual cotton crop, met with marketing leaders from the Plains Cotton Cooperative Association (PCCA) as well as Lubbock County farmers and researchers from the Fiber and Biopolymer Research Institute of the Department of Plant and Soil Science at Texas Tech University.

Wang and Texhong Chairman Hong Tianzhu also toured the U.S. Department of Agriculture Cotton Production and Processing Research Unit in Lubbock, where viewed ginning automation technology, including sample RFID tracking.

“Global demand for our products is growing consistently each year,” said Texhong Investment and Public Relations director Charles Wang. “As we expand our U.S. cotton purchases, we’d like to do so in Texas. We value our close and long-term relationship with PCCA”

Based in Lubbock since 1953, PCCA is a marketing cooperative owned by farmers in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and New Mexico. Its owners are responsible for about half of the U.S. annual cotton crop.

In addition to cotton marketing, PCCA also owns cotton warehouse facilities in Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas and develops and offers software programs and networks to local co-op gins that help add value to their grower-owners’ cotton.

Lubbock County is among the top cotton-producing counties in the U.S.

According to the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, the U.S. produced some 20 million bales of cotton in 2019, worth approximately $7 billion. One bale of cotton can make more than 200 pairs of jeans or 1,200 t-shirts. The U.S. is the third largest cotton grower in the world (after India and China), with its farms responsible for 35 percent of the world’s global cotton exports.

Texas is the largest state grower of cotton— making up approximately 40 percent of the total. Other top cotton-growing states are Georgia, Mississippi and Arkansas.

The top two users of raw cotton in the world are China and India, combining for slightly more than 50 percent of global use. Other leading users are Bangladesh, Vietnam and Turkey.

Founded in 1997, Texhong is one of the largest core cotton textile suppliers in the world, focused on high value-added core-spun cotton textile products. It says it has more than 3,000 customers, with sales offices in Los Angeles, China, Europe, South Korea, Hong Kong and Bangladesh.