I. Why Inner Mongolia's Apparel Is Two Lines, Not One Factory Belt

When sizing up a region's garment industry, the habit is to ask whether it has dense rows of garment factories and a complete weaving-dyeing chain. Measured by that ruler, Inner Mongolia scores low: it is not the kind of coastal garment belt where tens of thousands of contract factories cluster, and textiles and apparel are not a pillar in its industrial map.

Seen from another angle, however, Inner Mongolia's apparel holds two things other provinces cannot easily replicate.

The first is cashmere. Ordos took the region's fine goat cashmere and carried it all the way from raw fiber to branded knitwear hanging in retail stores; the weight of this line lies not in numbers but in the slice of global cashmere processing capacity it controls. The second is ethnic dress. The twenty-eight Mongolian tribes each have their own robe forms, trim techniques, and headdresses, and this dress system grown out of the grasslands is slowly turning from museum heritage into an industry with standards, firms, and workshops.

The Tianxia Gongchang Industry Research Institute treats Inner Mongolia's apparel as a regional sample not because of its size, but because it clearly shows a "resource- and culture-driven" garment path: rather than piling up output on cheap labor, it uses a scarce raw material and a distinct culture to carry a branded-knitwear line and an ethnic-dress line respectively. This report endorses no investment judgment; it simply maps both lines and honestly points out their gaps.

II. Ordos: Turning a Third of the World's Cashmere Processing Into a Garment

The hardest part of Inner Mongolia's apparel can almost be reduced to a single place name: Ordos.

The city gathers more than three hundred and sixty cashmere firms, sixty-five of them above-scale processors, producing over ten million cashmere items and twenty-five hundred tonnes of cashmere yarn a year, employing more than twenty thousand people. More important is its place in the global chain: Ordos accounts for about half of China's and a third of the world's cashmere processing and marketing capacity. From raw fiber through dehaired cashmere and yarn to finished garments, a substantial share of the processing is concentrated near this one city. This is a win not by factory count but by scaling and concentrating the deep processing of a scarce material.

The flagship that turned this line into a garment brand is the eponymous Ordos Group. Founded in 1980, it organizes raw material through self-built and partnered pastures and produces, brands, and sells cashmere apparel under several brands aimed at different audiences. By the listed company's own figures, its apparel segment posted revenue of about 3.756 billion yuan in 2023, up roughly thirteen percent year on year, with about 3.1 million cashmere sweaters and about 340 thousand scarves and shawls produced that year, lifting apparel to about twelve percent of total revenue. One detail worth noting: its brand end grew faster than the contract and raw-material ends, suggesting the line is trying to move up from "selling cashmere" to "selling a brand."

Another flagship that cannot be skipped is King Deer (Lu Wang). Founded in 1985 and headquartered in Donghe District of Baotou, it has an annual capacity of four million cashmere sweaters and over a million metres of woven fabric, with about seventy percent of its products exported to markets such as Europe, the US, Japan, and South Korea, and it is a national-level key leading enterprise in agricultural industrialization. It buys about two thousand tonnes of raw material a year from herders, linking pastoral raw cashmere into an industrialized processing and export chain.

Ordos Group and King Deer represent two playbooks for Inner Mongolia's cashmere apparel: one moves toward brand and domestic retail, the other toward scaled processing and export. Together they show that the moat of this garment line is not labor cost, but the fine raw material upstream that exists nowhere else, and the processing concentration grown around it.

III. Twenty-Eight Tribes: Ethnic Dress Moving from Heritage to Industry

If the cashmere sweater is the market-facing side of Inner Mongolia's apparel, ethnic dress is the side facing culture and place, and that side is now being seriously built into an industry.

Mongolian dress is not one undifferentiated thing. The Ujumqin robe of the Xilingol grassland is broad and vividly coloured, known for its trim work; the Khorchin dress around Tongliao favours embroidered floral, scroll, and fret patterns. The region holds twenty-eight surviving Mongolian tribes, each with its own robe, vest, headdress, and ornament system. This richness is a cultural asset, but it was also an industrialization problem: varied forms, handmade, hard to standardize.

The turning point came from standardization and heritage recognition layering together. In 2012, China's first local standard for traditional ethnic dress, "Mongolian Dress," took effect, codifying the features, classification, and styles of the twenty-eight tribes' costumes and issued in both Mongolian and Chinese editions; over several years, the region also completed a rescue-restoration of 108 costume sets and 34 headdress groups from the twenty-eight tribes, all handed to the Inner Mongolia Museum as permanent holdings. By 2021, Mongolian dress was listed in the fifth batch of national intangible cultural heritage. With a standard and a status, the handcraft scattered across the pastures finally had a basis for being organized at scale.

In the push toward industry, a "company plus workshop plus embroiderer" model has been practised repeatedly. For example, Inner Mongolia Mengyuan Culture integrates the region's traditional handcraft resources under the "Busigui" brand, forming a network of eighty-two workshops across all twelve leagues and cities, linking embroiderers and workshops scattered across the leagues into one brand and supply system to develop Mongolian dress and other specialty products. The West Ujumqin Banner area, long associated with ethnic dress, is among the Xilingol places working to convert its historical and cultural edge into an industrial one.

The significance of this line lies not in output scale but in pushing a cultural resource that easily stays at the level of performance and collection toward an industrial form that can be ordered, replicated, and supplied. Its difficulty is also clear: demand for ethnic dress carries a marked festival and occasion character, with a limited everyday market, and how to form a stable supply chain and sales channel while preserving each tribe's distinctive forms is the key to whether it truly stands.

IV. Leather, Fur, and Wool: An Underused Upstream

Beyond cashmere sweaters and ethnic dress, Inner Mongolia holds another garment-related but long-underused resource: leather and fur.

Inner Mongolia has a strong pastoral base and abundant hide and fur resources; historically its leather and wool industries had a glorious era, then declined, and the resource advantage failed to convert into an industrial one. To reverse this, the autonomous region set a clear goal: to push the combined industrial output of its leather and wool sectors past eight billion yuan by 2025, form two to three industrial parks each above one billion yuan in output, and cultivate a batch of leading enterprises, with an approach that coordinates fur trading markets, processing bases, and industrial towns.

The wool-spinning upstream already has a concrete anchor. A wool industrial park in Bayannur gathers more than fifty wool-scouring firms with over two thousand scouring machines, an annual scouring capacity of about one hundred thousand tonnes and actual processing of about eighty-five thousand tonnes, with annual industrial output of about 1.02 billion yuan, benefiting roughly ten thousand herding households. This resource sits nearer the very top of the garment chain; whether it can extend from "selling raw material and crude processing" toward "making finished goods and dress" will decide whether Inner Mongolia's garment chain can add a leather-and-fur and wool segment beyond cashmere.

V. The Chain's Gap: Strong at Both Ends, Thin in the Middle

Placing both lines and the upstream resources together, Inner Mongolia's apparel and garment industry shows a shape of "present at both ends, hollow in the middle."

Its upstream is strong: cashmere, wool, and fur endowments are scarce nationwide. Part of its terminal end is also strong: Ordos's cashmere knitwear brands and the twenty-eight tribes' ethnic dress are features hard to copy elsewhere. But the long middle stretch between raw material and terminal end — large-scale garment processing, fabric and trim support, design and supply-chain organization — is relatively weak. Apart from the comparatively complete cashmere chain, the region lacks the kind of tightly meshed, fast-reacting garment cluster of the coastal belts, and leather, fur, and wool remain largely at crude processing and raw-material sales.

This has real causes: Inner Mongolia is vast and sparsely populated, with industrial weight in energy, metallurgy, equipment, and farm-and-livestock processing, leaving apparel a supplementary labor-intensive sector; the dispersed pastures make it hard to pin upstream and downstream into one park as the east does; and ethnic dress, with its festival character, cannot sustain a year-round full-load garment line. All of this leaves the middle's garment-processing capacity thin.

For upstream suppliers serving the processing of cashmere, wool spinning, leather and fur, and ethnic dress — whether selling raw materials, fabric and trim, or sewing and embroidery equipment — to reach Inner Mongolia's garment and dress factory customers in volume, the Tianxia Gongchang platform lets you filter the factory directory and decision-maker contacts of Inner Mongolia's apparel and garment industry by region and sector, turning upstream client development from door-to-door inquiry into reading off a map.

VI. The Institute's View: Can Scarce Resources Close the Middle Gap

Pulling the threads together, Inner Mongolia's apparel and garment industry is not a dense factory belt but two lines carried by scarce resources and a distinct culture: one is Ordos's branded-knitwear line built on a third of the world's cashmere processing capacity, with more than three hundred and sixty cashmere firms, sixty-five above scale, the flagship Ordos Group posting over three billion yuan in apparel revenue and King Deer producing four million cashmere sweaters a year; the other is the ethnic dress of twenty-eight Mongolian tribes, moving from handcraft toward a "company plus workshop plus embroiderer" industrial form on the back of a local standard and national heritage recognition. Leather, fur, and wool form an upstream resource now being reorganized.

The Tianxia Gongchang Industry Research Institute's view is this: Inner Mongolia's apparel has clear strengths and clear weaknesses — strong in holding raw material and culture others lack, weak in the unfinished homework of garment processing between raw material and terminal end. The cashmere line stands precisely because it strings upstream resource, processing concentration, and terminal brand into a relatively complete chain; whether fur, wool, and ethnic dress can replicate this "from resource to finished good" through-line is the key to whether Inner Mongolia can grow a second and third garment line beyond cashmere. Its next stage hinges not on matching the east's factory belts in number, but on carrying each of its scarce resources, one by one, to the finished-goods end and into a brand. Sitting on raw material and selling raw material is easy; turning material into clothing and making people willing to pay for its label is the hard step worth taking.

Data Sources

  • Tianxia Gongchang (Inner Mongolia apparel and garment factory directory and industry data)
  • China News Service and the Dongsheng District Government of Ordos: reports on the Ordos cashmere industry (cashmere firm count, above-scale processors, annual output, national and global processing share, employment)
  • Inner Mongolia Ordos Resources Co., Ltd. 2023 Annual Report: apparel segment revenue, cashmere sweater and scarf/shawl output, apparel share of revenue
  • Baogao Daokeng and public materials on Inner Mongolia King Deer Cashmere: founding year, capacity, export share, and raw-material procurement scale
  • China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network and the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region Government: the twenty-eight Mongolian tribes' dress, the local standard "Mongolian Dress," and national heritage recognition
  • Public materials on Inner Mongolia Mengyuan Culture: the Busigui brand, eighty-two workshops across twelve leagues and cities, the company-workshop-embroiderer model
  • Department of Industry and Information Technology of Inner Mongolia: guiding opinions on promoting the region's leather and wool industry (2025 output and industrial-park targets)
  • Inner Mongolia News Network and public wool-industry materials: the Bayannur wool industrial park's scouring firm count, processing capacity, and output