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A number of internet and financial experts and scholars gathered in Nantong on Oct 31 to discuss how to promote the city's home textile industry by strengthening new infrastructure.

They probed into Nantong's own development approach to the industry and gave their insights at a seminar. The event took place at the Nantong International Conference Center.

Nantong is the hometown of textiles, well-known nationwide and boasting a long history and extensive industry base. High-end textiles have grown into one of Nantong's three key pillar industries. The home textile sector is the largest part of Nantong's textile industry, and has become the city's most distinctive name card.

Nantong's latest big action to boost the industry was establishing the Jiangsu Nantong International Home Textile Industrial Park. It came into being in July on an integrated area of the original Haiman Dearshiqiao market, the Tongzhou Zhihao market, and surrounding supporting areas, and covers about 50 square kilometers. More than 90 percent of the city's home textile manufacturing enterprises surround the two core textile markets.

In 2019, those two markets achieved a transaction volume of 221.1 billion yuan ($33.47 billion), of which e-commerce transactions amounted to 71.2 billion yuan. The market share of textile bedding products in the country exceeds 50 percent.

Qian Suomei, head of the Nantong International Home Textile Industrial Park preparatory work group, said that the park will become a new model city that has a world-class home textile industry cluster as its core and features integrated development and an environment suitable for business, living, business and travel.

Qian emphasized the importance of improving the technological research and development capabilities and intelligent manufacturing level of home textile products. The park will seek cooperation with leading R&D institutes and corporate champions such as Aliyun, Alibaba's cloud computing subsidiary. Industrial internet technology will be applied in the home textile industry to help it form an innovative development system.

The seminar was sponsored by the Nantong government and the Committee for the Promotion of Industrial Internet, and was undertaken by the Jiangsu Nantong International Home Textile Industrial Park and other units.