The United States and Europe want to say "goodbye" to clothing "Made in China"

The United States and Europe have grown accustomed to buying clothes made in Asian countries, but garment industry executives are increasingly certain this trend is changing. By the middle of the next decade, more clothing for those markets could be made close to home.

China and Bangladesh are the two largest garment manufacturers for Europe, while for the United States, it is the Chinese and Vietnamese who are responsible for most imports.

However, almost a quarter of the apparel executives who participated in a study conducted by the firm McKinsey and the German University RWTH Aachen believe that by 2025, more than half of the clothing sold in the US and Europe is manufactured in bordering countries.

This could represent Asia seeing garment production start to leave the continent.

In recent years, designer clothing manufacturers have moved some of their production into their homes to highlight their heritage and increase control over supply chains.

There is the case of Burberry and other British fashion brands, which brought part of their production back to the island, at the time that 'Made in England' became attractive to luxury buyers after of an import boom in the 1990s and early 2000s.

On the other hand, Hugo Boss, a German fashion brand, began selling the 'Made in Germany' collection, produced entirely (except for some fabrics) in Metzingen, the company's corporate headquarters.

However, 'value-based relocation' is an unappealing strategy for low-priced and mid-range apparel producers.

Clothing manufacturers are constantly searching between low production cost and short time to market. Therefore, as wages began to rise in China, they moved production to countries that are still relatively cheap, such as Vietnam and Bangladesh.

As a consequence, last year China's share of apparel imports declined in both the European Union and the United States.

But speeding delivery to market is a growing need, and consumers are increasingly concerned about the low wages and high environmental costs of producing abroad.

Not responding to demand for an item consumers have seen in an Instagram post can mean large volumes of unsold clothing.

Unable to tell consumers what to wear, producers must make short delivery times their number one priority, so fast fashion is giving way to ultra-fast fashion, practiced by online retailers like Boohoo, Asos and Lesara.

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This doesn't work well with shipping from Asia, as delivery to large western markets takes around 30 days by sea.

In addition, the Asian clothing market is growing and eventually producers in China, Vietnam and Bangladesh will have to focus on delivering their orders to their markets or the neighboring country, creating a shortage for Western buyers.

So far, higher production costs near large Western markets remain a stumbling block.

McKinsey calculated that the lower cost of transportation and lower tariffs make it less expensive to produce a basic pair of jeans in Mexico than it is in China for the US market, and in Turkey for the German market, although Bangladesh has significantly higher prices. lower than Turkey for the European market, and equals the costs of Mexico for the American Union.

On the other hand, moving production to the United States and Germany remains unfeasible, since the cost would rise 17 percent for American consumers and 144 percent for Germans.

But as lead times become more important, shortening them offsets some of the labor cost disadvantages by increasing the proportion of clothing sold at full price.

As an example, a 6.1 percent increase in the price of a garment that takes only 60 minutes to produce would justify the transfer of production from China to the US, McKinsey calculated.

In addition, automation can reduce the cost in Western countries. As an example, sewing a pair of jeans takes an average of 19 minutes, more than half of the total production time.

McKinsey and RWTH Aachen believe robotics will have the last word on the issue, as it can reduce the time it takes to make a garment by 40 to 90 percent. In another important step, to wear down jeans, the technology exists to reduce the time needed from about 20 minutes to 90 seconds: Levi's even does it with lasers.

82 percent of purchasing managers surveyed by McKinsey estimate that simple garment production will be fully automated by 2025. If they're right, production will come back, but jobs won't, and China probably won't blow its lead current even as it becomes more expensive.

Chinese garment companies are building factories in cheap labor countries closer to Europe, such as Ethiopia. With these caveats, it's likely that mass-market clothing buyers, not just expensive designers, will soon be dressing in geographically closer countries.

*This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg, and its owners, nor that of El Financiero. Leonid Bershidsky is a Bloomberg opinion columnist covering business and European politics. He is the founder and editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and opened the opinion site Slon.ru.