Textile Mills (United States, NAICS 313): An Investor's Primer

A Histometrics rollup primer for the NAICS 2022 subsector (three-digit) level, for public-market and private investors. NAICS is the North American Industry Classification System, the U.S. government's official scheme for grouping businesses; a three-digit "subsector" sits one rung above the four-digit industry groups beneath it. Figures are U.S. federal statistics unless noted; forward-looking statements are labeled as judgments in the text.

The one-paragraph version. NAICS 313 "Textile Mills" is the middle of the U.S. textile chain — the three sequential factory steps that turn raw fiber into finished cloth: spin it into yarn (3131), form that yarn or loose fiber into fabric (3132), then finish and coat the fabric (3133). It excludes both ends of the chain — making the fiber itself (a chemical or farm business) and sewing cloth into clothes, carpets, or home goods (the apparel and textile-product codes). All in, it is a ~$27 billion, ~80,000-worker, ~1,700-plant slice of U.S. manufacturing — small, mature, capital- and chemical-intensive, and battered by imports for 30 years. For an investor three facts dominate: the whole subsector holds essentially two genuine U.S.-listed pure-plays (one in nonwoven fabric, one in yarn) plus a couple of micro-caps, so it is overwhelmingly a private-market story; it has exactly one real growth engine — nonwoven fabric — while almost everything else is a mature specialty survivor kept alive by trade policy; and the revised child research now shows that even after the most favorable trade backdrop in a generation, the mature majority was still contracting through 2025, not yet recovering.

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1. Overview

Textile Mills (NAICS 313) is the conversion core of the U.S. textile supply chain. Read it as an assembly line three stations long:

1. Spin (NAICS 3131) — turn raw cotton, wool, or synthetic staple and filament into yarn (the strand you weave or knit) and thread (the strand you sew with).[2]
2. Form into fabric (NAICS 3132) — weave, knit, or bond that yarn or loose fiber into cloth — from denim and T-shirt jersey to seat-belt webbing and diaper stock.[3]
3. Finish and coat (NAICS 3133) — dye, print, and treat the cloth, or bond a polymer film onto it, to make it colored, water-resistant, flame-retardant, or wipe-clean.[4]

What sits outside 313 matters as much as what is in it. Making the fiber is not here — natural fiber comes from farms, and man-made fiber (polyester, nylon) is produced in the chemical code NAICS 325220. Turning cloth into a product is not here either — cut-and-sew apparel is NAICS 315, and carpets, towels, and other textile goods are NAICS 314. Subsector 313 is strictly the mills that process fiber into finished cloth in between.[2][3][4]

The three steps run in sequence, but they are not a single market, and the revised children make one qualification explicit: the boundaries between them are porous in both directions. Knitted mattress fabric has pushed down from premium into mid- and lower-price beds and now appears in nearly all compressed or boxed bedding, taking share directly from woven ticking, while nonwovens, films, and molded parts encroach on both knit and woven end uses.[3] A yarn spinner has migrated the other way — National Spinning's core business has shifted toward engineered nonwovens, moving a 3131 firm into 3132 territory.[2] Technology substitution inside the subsector is a real, if secondary, dynamic.

For an investor the subsector reads as a small, mature, capital-intensive processing industry dominated by private, family-held mills — one of the most water-, energy-, and emissions-regulated corners of U.S. manufacturing, and one of the most trade-exposed. Its fortunes turn less on the business cycle than on trade policy: tariffs, rules of origin, forced-labor bans, and defense-sourcing rules are what keep domestic mills in business at all.

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2. What's inside — the three child industries and how they differ

The three children run in sequence, but they are unequal in size, opposite in direction, and different in who owns them and how (if at all) you can buy them. This contrast — not the ~$27 billion total — is the real content of this level.

(NAICS codes shown; HHI = Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, a standard antitrust gauge summing every firm's squared market share, where under ~1,000–1,500 is "unconcentrated." NYSE = New York Stock Exchange; PE = private equity. Shares are of NAICS 313 total receipts.[1])

How to read the table — five contrasts do the work:

1. Fabric Mills is half the subsector, and one grandchild inside it is the whole story. Within 3132, nonwoven fabric — plastic melted or fibers fused into engineered sheet (diaper stock, wipes, surgical gowns, filters, house wrap) — is about $7.7 billion on its own, roughly 57% of Fabric Mills.[3] That single national industry is larger than the entire yarn subsector (3131) or the entire finishing-and-coating subsector (3133) — more than a quarter of all of Textile Mills — and it is the only genuinely growing piece in the subsector. Its mix is also shifting the way an investor would want: durable end uses were already 51% of 2022 North American nonwovens production by tonnage against 49% disposable, and recent line additions skew further toward longer-life applications.[3] Everything else in 313 is a mature, import-battered specialty niche.
2. Concentration runs opposite to size — and only one detail industry is anywhere near concentrated. The smallest child by plant count — yarn spinning (3131), ~15% of the subsector's plants — is by far the most concentrated (HHI 952.5, top 4 = 54.2%, just under the U.S. Department of Justice's 1,000 line), because spinning is so capital-heavy that a few big mills dominate.[2] Beneath the other two children sit six more detail industries, and every one of them is fragmented: nonwoven 322.8, coating 288.6, narrow 385, finishing 386, broadwoven 441.9, knit 494.[3][4] So the subsector is not one competitive structure; it is a concentrated first step feeding six fragmented later ones.[1][2][3][4]
3. Public access is nearly nil, and clusters in the same few names. Across ~$27 billion of activity there are essentially two genuine U.S.-listed pure-plays — Magnera (nonwoven fabric) and Unifi (yarn) — plus a couple of micro-caps. The same small tickers recur as proxies across children, and for a structural reason: Culp shows up in fabric weaving, knitting, and finishing because its mattress-fabric business is integrated weave-dye-finish, and Unifi shows up in all three children as the upstream yarn read.[2][3][4] For most investors this is a private-market and specialty-operator subsector, not a stock-picking one.
4. The same private majors span multiple steps. Vertically integrated firms — Milliken (22 integrated plants in the U.S. Southeast), Glen Raven, Mount Vernon Mills, Elevate Textiles — weave and finish (and sometimes spin) inside one company. Milliken and Glen Raven appear on the rosters of both 3133 children and inside 3132, the clearest evidence that operators do not treat these as separate businesses even though the statistics do — and, as §3 explains, that vertical integration hides output from the federal counts.[3][4]
5. Import exposure is wildly uneven — this is what a rollup can see that a child cannot. The subsector is described as uniformly import-battered, and on the commodity end that is right: USDA put 2025 U.S. cotton textile and apparel imports at roughly 8.5 billion raw-fiber-equivalent pounds against domestic cotton-mill use of about 0.8 billion, and Asia-Pacific holds roughly two-thirds of the global webbing market.[3][4] But nonwovens is structurally different: North America's 2022 net imports were 305,200 tonnes, equal to just 6.5% of regional production, because nonwoven fabric is bulky, freight-sensitive, and made near where it is used.[3] The subsector's one growth engine is also the one piece that imports largely cannot reach — those two facts are the same fact.

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3. Size (this level's rollup figures)

These are our ground-truth federal figures for NAICS 313, with the children shown so you can see where the mass sits and confirm they sum.[1]

(EC = Economic Census, the Census Bureau's every-five-years survey, most recent 2022; CBP = its annual County Business Patterns, most recent 2023. The children sum cleanly: establishments 250+736+717 = 1,703; employees 18,290+40,117+21,358 = 79,765 — both exact. Payroll ~$0.81B+$2.18B+$1.18B ≈ $4.17B and receipts sum to ~$27.03B, matching the group totals. The 1,461 group firm count is slightly below the 1,501 child sum because a company that operates in two of the children is counted once here but once in each child — a normal reconciliation artifact, not a contradiction.)

Put plainly, all of U.S. Textile Mills is a ~$27 billion, ~80,000-worker, ~1,700-plant slice of an economy measured in tens of trillions — genuinely small. It runs at about $339,000 of revenue per worker and pays roughly $52,000 per worker on average, and with 1,703 plants across 1,461 firms, most operators run a single mill — this is a fragmented field of small companies, not a handful of conglomerates.[1] It is also small by federal definition: the two children that report a size standard carry ceilings of 1,250 employees (yarn) and 1,000 employees (both finishing and coating), which essentially every operator in the subsector clears — relevant for set-aside contracting and SBA lending.[2][4] Concentration is discussed in §8. For wider context, the whole U.S. textile-and-apparel supply chain from fiber to finished product employs somewhere between ~453,000 and ~471,000 people depending on the vintage cited by the children, on roughly $60.9 billion of shipments; the textile-mill workforce alone was about 89,000 in 2024.[2][3][6]

The trend the snapshot hides — and it is not uniform. The census tables are a still frame. The revised children now supply the motion, and it is severe on the legacy steps:

• Broadwoven weaving shed 84.8% of its jobs between 2000 and 2024 (120,867 → 18,412), one of the largest declines of any detailed U.S. manufacturing industry; the 2002 Economic Census counted 758 broadwoven plants, 80,530 employees, and $11.4 billion of shipments against $3.63 billion today.[3]
• Knit fabric shrank roughly 30% in establishments and employment in a single decade, from 178 companies and 7,474 employees in 2012.[3] Schiffli machine embroidery went from 357 firms and ~6,000 workers in 1977 to well under 2,000 by 2000.[3]
• Finishing receipts fell from about $4.9 billion in 2017 to ~$3.90 billion in 2022 — roughly a fifth in nominal terms — and the Bureau of Labor Statistics productivity series, published natively at this four-digit level, shows group 3133 employment falling from an estimated 26,400 in 2024 to 21,800 in 2025, with output down 4.0% and hours worked down 17.3%. Hours falling faster than output is the signature of capacity rationalization, not a demand blip.[4][10]
• Yarn spinning is at a historic floor: USDA put domestic cotton mill use at 1.9 million bales in 2023/24, the lowest in nearly 140 years, and by 2026 exports accounted for more than 85% of demand for U.S. raw cotton versus under 40% in the 1990s, because the spinning itself moved offshore.[2] Mill counts roughly halved after 1997, and the U.S. is now "down to its last ~100 cotton mills."[2][3]
• Nonwovens is the exception — nothing comparable happened to it, which is precisely why it now dominates the subsector.[3]

Where the children disagree on headcount. Employment for yarn spinning does not settle: County Business Patterns puts 2023 at 18,290 (the figure in the table above), while the BLS productivity series for NAICS 3131 carries roughly 20,100 for 2025. The gap is definitional and vintage-driven, not a correction — treat "roughly 18,000–20,000" as the honest range.[2][10] The same caution applies to the BLS 3133 series above: it is scoped differently from CBP and does not line up level-for-level with the 21,358 count in the table. Read it as direction, not as a revision.[4]

Undercount caveat — read it, it cuts two specific ways. Unlike restaurants, trades, or child care, this subsector is not undercounted by tiny or informal operators — these are real, permitted, capital-intensive, taxed factories that the Census captures well. The distortions run differently:

• Captive and vertically integrated processing is booked elsewhere. A firm that spins, weaves, and dyes inside one integrated plant is counted once, under its primary product — so a weaver that also dyes lands in fabric mills, not finishing; a knitter that finishes lands in knit; a consumer-goods giant that spins its own nonwovens to feed diaper lines (Kimberly-Clark, Procter & Gamble) books that output under sanitary-paper products, not here; and DuPont's flashspun Tyvek and glass mats can land in chemical or glass codes.[3][4] Because the same vertical majors (Milliken, Glen Raven, Mount Vernon, Elevate) span several children, the true amount of U.S. spinning, fabric-forming, and finishing is larger than the code totals — the gap is biggest in nonwovens. One useful cross-check: an independent trade estimate put 2022 U.S. coated-fabric production at ~$2.6 billion against Census receipts of $2.884 billion, so Census is not obviously missing merchant capacity; the gap to much larger private market-research numbers is definitional, not a counting error.[4]
• U.S. production is not U.S. consumption — but the gap differs enormously by child. These figures measure what U.S. mills make, not what Americans buy. On the commodity end the gap is overwhelming (see §2, contrast 5), and U.S.-headquartered firms run big offshore footprints not counted here — Parkdale operates ~29 plants across the U.S. and Latin America, American & Efird operates in 22 countries, and Unifi runs across Brazil, Central America, and Asia.[2] In nonwovens the gap nearly vanishes.[3] The domestic figures are the authoritative baseline for the industry, not for the market it serves.

No value in our data is suppressed.

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4. Investable universe (where value concentrates across the children)

Value in Textile Mills concentrates in one child (nonwoven fabric) and, within every child, in a handful of scale players plus a specialty tail — but almost all of it is reached privately. There is no U.S.-listed pure-play for the subsector and no dedicated exchange-traded fund (ETF); index exposure arrives diluted, through broad materials and consumer-staples funds.

• Nonwoven fabric (inside 3132) — where the only real public exposure lives. The single U.S.-listed pure-play in the whole subsector is Magnera (NYSE: MAGN), the world's largest nonwovens producer (~$3.2B FY2025 revenue), formed by the 2024 Berry Global/Glatfelter merger — and a customer-concentrated one, with its largest customer at ~14% of FY2025 sales and its ten largest at ~42%. Nonwoven lines also sit inside diversified public companies — Mativ (MATV) in filtration and healthcare media, DuPont (Tyvek), Kimberly-Clark and Procter & Gamble (captive hygiene), Amcor, Owens Corning, Berkshire Hathaway's Johns Manville (~$725M of nonwovens sales in 2024) — plus international listings (Indorama Ventures/Avgol, Toray, Suominen), with much of the rest private or PE-owned (Freudenberg, Fitesa, Ahlstrom, Alkegen, Hollingsworth & Vose).[3]
• Yarn and thread (3131) — one micro-cap, rest private. The only listed pure-play is Unifi (NYSE: UFI) — maker of REPREVE recycled-polyester yarn ($174.9M, ~31% of FY2025 sales) on ~$571M of FY2025 net sales, at a ~$70M market cap. It is a restructuring bet, not an income name: its Americas segment posted gross loss margins of 3.8%, 5.1%, and 5.8% in FY2023–FY2025, attributed largely to poor manufacturing utilization. The firms that actually dominate are private or foreign-owned: Parkdale Mills (America's largest spinner, ~29 plants), American & Efird (largest U.S. sewing-thread supplier and #2 worldwide, PE-owned under Elevate Textiles), National Spinning (employee-owned), and Switzerland's Buhler Quality Yarns (~100M lb/yr).[2]
• Fabric weaving and knitting (rest of 3132) — private majors, thin public edges. The real assets are private: Milliken, Glen Raven (Sunbrella), Elevate Textiles (Cone Denim, Burlington), Mount Vernon Mills (~750 employees, six U.S. facilities), plus family knitters (Beverly Knits, Contempora, Gehring, Apex Mills, Texollini). Listed proxies are edge cases — a micro-cap (Culp, ~$204M FY2026 net sales; note the child primers disagree on its exchange, one listing it on the NYSE and the other on NASDAQ), an adjacent industrial weaver (Albany International, NYSE: AIN, ~$708M machine-clothing segment in 2025), upstream Unifi, and foreign narrow-fabric makers (Best Pacific/HKEX 2111 ~$538M, Taiwan Paiho/TWSE 9938 ~US$400M), with a downstream read through seat-belt maker Autoliv (NYSE: ALV) and supplier Avient (NYSE: AVNT).[3]
• Finishing and coating (3133) — micro-caps and diversified proxies, with two live caveats. Finishing's nearest listed read is small-cap Culp, whose integrated weave-dye-finish economics track the industry; coating's lone pure-play is micro-cap Uniroyal Global (OTCQB: UNIR), owner of Naugahyde (~$70M revenue) — but its most recent SEC annual filing covers fiscal 2021, so any position requires separate securities diligence. Broader coating exposure runs through diversified multinationals (Saint-Gobain, Trelleborg, SergeFerrari, Surteco, SRF, Sioen, Freudenberg) and Japanese airbag-fabric names (Asahi Kasei, Toyobo, Toray, Seiren). One of those routes is closing: Continental agreed on July 4, 2026 to sell ContiTech to Lone Star Funds for €4.0 billion plus up to €250 million in performance payments, with closing expected by end-2026. The bulk is the same private majors plus ~450 small commission dyehouses and private coaters (Seaman, Cooley, Herculite, Haartz, Morbern, Shawmut).[4]
• Shared indirect exposure. The upstream/adjacent reads recur across all three children: chemical and fiber suppliers DuPont (NYSE: DD), Dow (NYSE: DOW), Chemours (NYSE: CC) for the resin/dye/PFAS angle, and equipment maker Kornit Digital (NASDAQ: KRNT) for digital textile printing.[4]

Where value concentrates: disproportionately in the certified, qualification-gated specialty grades across every child — recycled and performance yarns; nonwoven filtration, medical, and hygiene stock; Berry-compliant defense fabric; airbag and architectural coated fabric — not in the commodity apparel yarn, cloth, and dyeing that face the hardest import competition. Reserve tickers and valuation detail for the child primers; at this level the takeaway is that meaningful exposure to U.S. textile-making is overwhelmingly a private-market activity, with nonwovens the lone material public exception.

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5. How the money works

Despite three different technologies, all of Textile Mills makes money the same fundamental way — and it is neither a utility's rate base, a REIT's rents, nor a miner's cost-per-ounce. Every mill in the subsector is a spread-times-utilization processor:

• Spread. The mill buys an input, converts it, and sells the output for more. Each step buys the prior step's product: spinners buy fiber (cotton, purchased polyester); weavers and knitters buy yarn; nonwovens lines buy resin or loose fiber; finishers and coaters buy greige (undyed) cloth plus dyes, chemicals, or polymer resin. The revised children now converge on the same input-cost number from several directions — raw materials are roughly 60–70% of cost in nonwovens, in broadwoven, and in knit — and it tracks commodities: cotton is weather-driven, synthetics and resin are oil-linked, and yarn makers state they do not hedge, so the exposure passes straight through the chain.[2][3][4] Because input is largely a pass-through, the durable margin comes from product mix, not the commodity spread.
• Utilization. The machinery — spinning frames, looms, knitting and nonwoven lines, dyeing ranges, coating lines — is expensive and mostly a fixed cost (depreciation, energy, 24/7 staffing). A single modern nonwovens line runs roughly $30–50 million, with whole projects reaching $500 million or more.[3] Profit hinges on running near full. This is a business of operating leverage: small swings in volume or price move margins a lot, and idle capacity is the enemy — the clearest published proof is Unifi's Americas segment, whose three consecutive years of negative gross margin are attributed largely to poor utilization.[2] Electricity intensity is now decisive; it was blamed directly for several 2024–26 U.S. spinning-plant closures.[2]
• Mix is the strategy. In every child, commodity output earns thin, cyclical, import-exposed margins, while certified, engineered, specialty output earns more and is sticky — because qualifying a new supplier (a defense-fabric spec, a medical-barrier grade, an airbag coating, a filtration medium) is slow and costly, which locks customers in. That switching-cost moat, not scale alone, is what protects the survivors.[3][4] The commodity end really is thin, and the children now put numbers on it: commodity polypropylene hygiene fabric runs a gross margin around 25%, the listed nonwovens leader posted only an ~11% EBITDA margin in FY2025, and Culp's mattress-fabric segment managed a 7.0% gross margin in FY2025.[3] (EBITDA = earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, a common cash-earnings proxy.)
• Price realization diverges sharply across the subsector. The two published price series at the ends of the chain point in opposite directions. The producer price index for cotton spun yarn stood at 82.2 in June 2026 against a May 2022 base of 100 — selling prices roughly 18% below that base.[2] The producer price index for fabric coating rose from 218.3 in December 2020 to 297.4 in April 2026, about 36%.[4] Spinners absorbed deflation; coaters passed the post-2020 input shock through. That is the single sharpest illustration of where pricing power sits in this subsector — and there is no equivalent public read for finishing.

The one economic divide inside the subsector is capital intensity. Nonwovens (~$460K revenue per worker) and coating (~$400K) are the most automated, plant-like steps; yarn spinning (~$363K) is capital-heavy but labor-present; commodity finishing (~$270K) and narrow-fabric weaving (~$200K) are the most craft- and labor-intensive.[3][4] One caveat on the broadwoven figure: at the Census employment count it is ~$273K, but BLS reports 18,412 broadwoven workers for 2024, on which basis the same shipments spread to roughly $200K — the ordering of nonwovens against the rest is not in doubt, but the ordering among the legacy steps is survey-dependent.[3] Government money is also part of the model: the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Adjustment Assistance for Textile Mills (EAATM) pays domestic mills a per-pound cotton subsidy (raised from 3¢ to 5¢/lb effective August 2025).[2][8] Analyze any operator here like a capacity-utilization manufacturer — watching input costs, line-hours, and mix — not like a regulated or income vehicle. A candid limit carried up from the children: with one micro-cap pure-play per child and stale disclosure on one of them, there is no usable public margin benchmark for most of this subsector. Underwriting here is a plant-by-plant exercise, not a screen.[4]

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6. Demand drivers

Because the three children serve overlapping but distinct end markets, the subsector's demand is a bundle of partly independent drivers — which is part of why the survivors are resilient (a weak apparel year need not sink the medical or defense lines):

• Trade policy and traceability (the shared macro engine). The yarn-forward rules of origin in USMCA (United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement) and CAFTA-DR (Dominican Republic–Central America Free Trade Agreement) grant apparel duty-free U.S. access only if the yarn and everything forward is made in-region — effectively making U.S. mills the mandatory supplier for a nearshore apparel bloc, worth roughly $4.0 billion of U.S. yarn exports in 2024. Since 2021 USMCA has extended the same logic to sewing thread, and its textile rules require qualifying narrow elastic fabric used in apparel to originate in the region.[2][3][7] Layer on Section 301 China tariffs, the staged closure of the de minimis small-parcel loophole, and UFLPA (Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act) enforcement, and 2025 was the most favorable domestic-demand backdrop in a generation — though §10 records that it has not yet shown up as growth.[2][3][4]
• Hygiene, medical, and filtration (nonwovens' engines). Diapers and feminine care (~32% of nonwoven demand), the aging-population tailwind of adult incontinence, wipes, surgical gowns and masks (plus PPE — personal protective equipment — reshoring), and the bright secular pocket of filtration (cleanrooms, data centers, indoor air). These are the closest thing the subsector has to non-discretionary growth, against a global nonwovens market estimated near $44 billion.[3]
• Automotive and industrial safety. Seat-belt webbing, airbag fabric and tethers, and interior trim rise with safety content per vehicle and pull yarn, fabric, and coating together — automotive is roughly a third of the global coated-fabrics market, and coated fabrics are about 73% of the airbag-fabric market. EV interiors and lightweighting are now changing coating specifications rather than just cycling volume.[3][4]
• Defense and technical. Berry-compliant military textiles, parachutes, protective and filtration fabric — steady, domestic-only demand that sets a floor. For scale on that floor: Department of Defense procurement of textile and apparel articles ran $2.3 billion in fiscal 2021, against a subsector that ships ~$27 billion in total. The U.S. technical-textiles market is projected to grow ~3.9% a year to 2030, and global coated fabrics ~5%.[3][4]
• Sustainability and recycled content. Brand commitments to recycled fiber (Unifi's REPREVE) and PFAS-free/PVC-free reformulation reshape specifications across every child; on the finishing side, made-to-order digital textile printing can cut water use by up to ~95% and favors quick-turn domestic runs.[2][4]
• Reshoring and construction. Nearshoring away from China, plus house wrap, roofing mats, and geotextiles leveraged to housing starts and federal infrastructure spending.[3]

Two headwinds belong in the same list. Falling U.S. birth rates weigh on diaper volumes — the final 2024 total fertility rate was a record-low 1,599.5 births per 1,000 women — and, within the subsector, knitted mattress fabric continues to displace woven ticking.[3] The mature steps (yarn, weaving, knitting, commodity finishing) grow in the low single digits or shrink; nonwovens and technical/coated grades grow low-to-mid single digits and carry most of the subsector's growth.

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7. Regulation

Textile Mills is lightly regulated as a material but heavily governed through trade policy and through its water, air, and chemical footprint — and trade rules, in several of these children, are what create domestic demand at all.

• Trade and procurement (the decisive lever, and unusually favorable to domestic mills). Yarn-forward rules of origin (USMCA, CAFTA-DR); Section 301 China tariffs, which reached roughly 145% on Chinese textiles in 2025; the de minimis repeal, which arrived in stages — the exemption ended for China in May 2025, was closed effective August 29, 2025 (it had admitted more than 1.36 billion low-cost parcels duty-free in 2024), with full statutory repeal codified for July 2027; UFLPA forced-labor bans; and the Berry Amendment (10 U.S.C. 4862) and Kissell Amendment, which require U.S.-made textiles for the Department of Defense and some homeland-security purchases.[2][3][4][7] The flip side: the subsector is a policy beneficiary, so its fortunes are unusually sensitive to reversal — the USMCA joint review is a live event, and Defense Logistics Agency staff floated major changes to the Berry Amendment in 2025.[2][3] The National Council of Textile Organizations (NCTO) is the industry's advocacy voice.[6]
• Environmental (the clearest shared exposure). Dye and finishing effluent falls under the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Textile Mills Effluent Guidelines (40 CFR Part 410) and Clean Water Act permits — a rule cited by every child, and one that explicitly reaches nonwoven products as well as woven and knit.[2][3][4][9] Coating solvent emissions fall under Clean Air Act rules including a fabric-coating NESHAP (National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants) covering toluene, MEK, methanol, xylenes, and formaldehyde, with VOC controls for new polymeric-coating facilities.[4] PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, "forever chemicals") used in water/stain repellents are a live, group-wide restriction: California (AB 1817, codified at Health and Safety Code §108971) and New York banned them in most textiles from January 1, 2025, with thresholds tightening in 2027, and the EPA is moving toward textile-wastewater limits.[4] One nuance the children add and the parent previously missed: EPA has noted that sites may keep discharging PFAS after they stop using the chemistry — so "PFAS-free product" does not mean "PFAS-free site," and the liability can outlive the reformulation.[4][9]
• Worker and product safety. OSHA's cotton-dust standard (29 CFR 1910.1043) applies in full to yarn manufacturing and still reaches cotton slashing and weaving; end-use standards include auto seat-belt and flammability specs (FMVSS 209; FMVSS 302, which caps interior-material burn rate at 102 millimeters per minute), Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Class II medical fabrics, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) N95 certification, geotextile transportation specs (AASHTO M288), and Consumer Product Safety Commission flammability rules (16 CFR 1610 and the 16 CFR 1633 mattress standard). In wipes, the WIPPES Act national "Do Not Flush" labeling standard is at or near enactment as of mid-2026.[2][3][4] Enforcement volume is modest relative to the environmental burden: across all of NAICS 3133, federal OSHA inspections from October 2024 through September 2025 produced just 21 citations across 10 inspections, mostly machine guarding and lockout/tagout.[4]
• Farm support. The USDA EAATM per-pound cotton payment to domestic mills (raised from 3¢ to 5¢/lb, August 2025).[2][8]

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8. Consolidation

By the federal concentration math, U.S. Textile Mills is a fragmented, unconcentrated subsector. For 2022 the top 4 firms held 19.3% of receipts, the top 8 27.6%, the top 20 41.9%, and the top 50 58.8%, with an HHI of just 144.7 — well under the antitrust "unconcentrated" line.[1]

But read that number with care — it understates the real structure. The subsector HHI (145) is lower than any of its children's, including the two fragmented ones (fabric 151.3, finishing/coating 177.7) — and far below the concentrated one (yarn 952.5). It is lower still than every one of the seven detail industries beneath them, which range from 288.6 (coating) to 494 (knit) before you reach yarn.[1][2][3][4] That is a statistical artifact, not a finding: the subsector pools product markets whose firms mostly do not compete with one another, so combining them dilutes measured concentration. A handful of private groups (Milliken, Glen Raven) do appear in more than one child, but no child's leaderboard is dominated by one firm, so the pooling still dilutes rather than compounds.[4] The economically meaningful concentration lives within each child — genuinely high only in yarn spinning (HHI 952.5, top-4 = 54.2%, because capital-heavy spinning supports only a few big mills) and genuinely low everywhere else. Do not treat the subsector HHI of 145 as the "true" competitive concentration of any actual market. One further caution on the deep ratios: very high top-50 shares in the smaller detail industries (knit 95.7%, coating 88.7%, narrow 88.8%) reflect tiny firm populations — 97, 138, and 154 firms respectively — not dominance.[3][4]

Where a roll-up thesis actually sits. The fragmented tail is concentrated in finishing: its top 50 firms hold about 79% of a 501-firm industry, against coating's top 50 holding 88.7% of just 138 firms — which is to say coating's top 50 essentially are the industry. By arithmetic, the several hundred sub-scale operators available to a consolidator are on the finishing side, alongside yarn's ~200 smaller mills sitting under the leaders.[2][4]

The direction of consolidation differs by child but rhymes:

• A decades-long shakeout is the base state. U.S. textile mill counts roughly halved after 1997 and supply-chain employment fell for a generation; it continues in real time. Even the largest spinner, Parkdale, closed four U.S. plants across 2024–2026 — Sanford and Walnut Cove, North Carolina; Mountain City, Tennessee; and a 109-year-old Hillsville, Virginia facility — several blamed explicitly on rising energy costs, while Unifi simultaneously restructured toward higher-value recycled and performance yarns.[2]
• Nonwovens consolidates around scale. Berry Global spun its nonwovens/films arm into a November 2024 merger with Glatfelter to form Magnera (instantly the world's largest producer), and Amcor acquired the rest of Berry Global for ~$10.4 billion in April 2025; in Europe, Ahlstrom-Munksjö went private under Bain Capital and Lydall-Unifrax formed Alkegen. The specialty end stays fragmented even after all of it.[3]
• The legacy steps consolidate slowly, by attrition and roll-up. Weak commodity mills exit; survivors scale, specialize, or are rolled up by private equity (Elevate Textiles assembling Burlington and Cone Denim; Beverly Knits acquiring Gentry Mills and forming Creative Dyeing & Finishing; Apex Mills taking over a 240,000-square-foot former Hanesbrands plant). On the coating side the same pattern runs through ownership changes rather than closures: Synthomer bought Omnova in 2020 and sold the coated-fabrics business to Surteco effective February 2023 (correcting the 2021 date this page previously implied), the Sioen family took Sioen Industries private in 2021, and Continental agreed in July 2026 to sell ContiTech to Lone Star Funds.[3][4] A recurring driver is succession — aging family owners with no heir and costly machines to replace — which feeds tuck-in acquisitions.[2][3][4]
• A newer pattern: foreign strategics buying U.S. capacity. Hansae of South Korea acquired the circular knitter Texollini in 2024, and Artistic Milliners of Pakistan agreed to take a majority stake in Cone Denim from Elevate Textiles, expected to close in Q1 2026 — alongside long-standing foreign ownership in yarn (Switzerland's Buhler). Offshore producers now value a U.S. footprint enough to pay for one, which is itself a read on the trade backdrop.[2][3]

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9. Risks

The subsector's risks are the union of its children's, and they cluster into a few themes:

• Structural import competition (the permanent headwind). Cheaper Asian yarn, cloth, and finished apparel caps domestic pricing on anything commodity-grade; survival is tied to protective policy and to moving up-market.[2][3][4] The knit child sharpens the mechanism: imported finished apparel may do more damage than imported fabric, because a foreign-sewn garment removes the domestic cut-and-sew customer who would have bought U.S. cloth at all.[3] In nonwovens the analog is overcapacity, exemplified by the post-COVID meltblown glut (global volume fell from a ~368,000-tonne 2020 peak to ~254,000 tonnes by 2023).[3]
• Trade-policy reversal (the tailwind is political). Demand leans on yarn-forward rules, Berry/Kissell content rules, Section 301 tariffs, and forced-labor enforcement; any weakening hits demand directly. The USMCA joint review is live, and a Berry Amendment loosened along the lines DLA staff proposed in 2025 would erode the domestic defense edge across every child. This is the central forward-looking risk.[2][3]
• Input-cost and spread volatility. Cotton (crop/weather) and oil-linked synthetics, resin, and plasticizer move the thin conversion margin directly at 60–70% of cost; nonwovens and coating face spread compression when resin outruns lagging pass-through clauses; yarn repricing lags run up to two fiscal quarters; and life-safety narrow fabrics carry availability and requalification risk in specialty fibers such as aramid and UHMWPE.[2][3][4]
• Energy-cost exposure. Spinning's and processing's electricity intensity was the proximate cause of several 2024–26 closures, including at the largest domestic spinner.[2]
• End-market cyclicality and substitution. Housing, furniture, autos, apparel, and construction swing orders quickly; a demographic headwind (a record-low 2024 fertility rate) specifically threatens diaper volumes; and within the subsector, knits displace woven ticking while nonwovens, films, and molded parts encroach on knit and woven applications.[3]
• Customer concentration and insourcing. Dependence on a single automaker, defense program, bedding program, or hygiene buyer caps supplier power — the listed nonwovens leader's top ten customers alone are ~42% of sales — and hygiene giants can insource.[3][4]
• Capital intensity and stranded assets. High fixed costs make a lost anchor customer quickly unprofitable — the classic capital trap that led Berkshire Hathaway, once a New England weaver, to exit textiles entirely; merger-heavy nonwoven balance sheets add leverage risk (the listed leader posted a net loss in FY2025).[3]
• Labor and skills. A newly explicit, cross-child risk: experienced loom setters, weaving and knitting mechanics, dye-house personnel, textile engineers, and specialized nonwovens operators are aging out and hard to replace. The work is industrial — BLS recorded a 2.2-per-100-full-time-worker injury and illness rate in nonwoven fabric mills in 2024.[3]
• Regulatory/ESG obsolescence and liability. PFAS and PVC restrictions can strand product lines and force costly reformulation, especially in finishing, coating, and single-use nonwovens — and PFAS site liability can outlive the decision to stop using the chemistry.[4][9]
• Disclosure and small-cap risk. The public on-ramps are thin enough that stale or absent reporting is itself a risk: the coating pure-play's most recent SEC annual filing covers fiscal 2021.[4]

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10. How to invest & outlook

How to invest. Public routes are thin and imperfect across the whole subsector; match the route to the step:

• The two clean-ish public bets are Magnera (NYSE: MAGN) in nonwoven fabric — a leveraged, cyclical, small-cap turnaround levered to nonwoven spreads and utilization, with meaningful customer concentration — and Unifi (NYSE: UFI) in yarn — a micro-cap deep-value/recycled-fiber play levered to trade policy, whose three straight years of negative Americas gross margin make it a restructuring and utilization-recovery bet rather than clean industry beta. Neither is an income or index holding.[2][3]
• Everything else is edge cases: micro-caps (Culp, Uniroyal/UNIR — the latter with stale disclosure), adjacent industrials (Albany International/AIN), diversified giants that carry nonwoven or coating segments (Mativ, DuPont, Kimberly-Clark, Procter & Gamble, Amcor, Owens Corning, Berkshire Hathaway, Saint-Gobain, Trelleborg — with Continental's ContiTech route closing by end-2026), chemical suppliers for the PFAS/reformulation angle (DD, DOW, CC), equipment maker Kornit (KRNT), upstream and downstream reads (Avient/AVNT, Autoliv/ALV), and foreign listings (Best Pacific/HKEX 2111, Taiwan Paiho/TWSE 9938, Indorama/Avgol, Toray, Toyobo, Asahi Kasei, Suominen). There is no textile-mills, nonwovens, or textiles ETF for clean index exposure.[3][4]
• The core of the whole subsector is a private-market activity: direct or PE ownership of the private majors (Milliken, Glen Raven, Elevate, Parkdale, Mount Vernon) and of profitable, cash-generative specialty mills with certified recycled, defense, medical, automotive, or architectural positions — steady free-cash-flow businesses bought at manufacturing multiples, prized for the switching-cost moats that certification creates, and structurally suited (fragmented, mostly single-plant, succession-driven, essentially all federally "small") to platform-and-bolt-on roll-ups, with the deepest tail of sub-scale targets on the finishing side. Underwrite on plant utilization, customer diversification, specialty mix, PFAS/PVC-compliance status (including legacy site discharge, not just product formulation), and equipment age. The decisive diligence question is not which technology a mill runs but what share of its revenue is qualified program work versus commodity yardage.[3][4]

Outlook (judgment). Textile Mills is a mature, policy-dependent, consolidating subsector with one growth engine and a durable up-market strategy — not a growth sector. Read it as two stories running at once. Nonwoven fabric — the single largest and only genuinely growing piece, and the one insulated from imports by freight economics — should deliver low-single-digit U.S. volume and mid-single-digit global value growth against a market near $44 billion, led by adult incontinence, filtration, medical/PPE reshoring, and geotextiles, with new North American capacity tilting toward longer-life durable applications; the drags are resin-spread swings, overcapacity, buyer power, and sustainability pressure on single-use plastics.[3]

The mature majority — yarn spinning, weaving, knitting, and commodity finishing — is where the revised children genuinely disagree, and the disagreement is worth stating rather than averaging. The fabric child reads 2025 as an inflection: the most favorable trade backdrop in years, steady Berry-Amendment demand as a floor, foreign strategics paying for U.S. capacity, and hard evidence of reinvestment in Glen Raven's announced $250 million expansion program targeting more than 30% additional production capability and over 400 jobs.[3] The finishing-and-coating child reads the same year as continued rationalization: U.S. textile output still fell ~4% in 2025 despite the new tariffs, as imports shifted country rather than reshoring, with group output down 4.0% and hours down 17.3%, and it concludes that "shrinkage is the base case, not a downside scenario."[4] The yarn child sits between them — a policy floor over a volume story at a 140-year low.[2] Our read of the two together: the policy tailwind is real but has not yet turned into measured domestic growth, and the honest base case for the mature majority is stabilization at a much smaller scale, not recovery — with the durable direction up-market into technical, performance, protective, medical, and automotive grades against persistent import competition, input-cost sensitivity, an aging skilled workforce, and political contingency. The floor under the whole subsector is set largely by how protective U.S. trade policy stays. Treat it as a specialist, contrarian, or private-ownership play, with public exposure available cleanly only in nonwovens. For company-level detail on any step, read its primer: NAICS 3131 (Fiber, Yarn & Thread), 3132 (Fabric Mills), and 3133 (Finishing & Coating).

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Sources

This rollup is synthesized from the three child primers and from our ingested ground-truth federal statistics for NAICS 313. Each child primer carries its own underlying sources (U.S. Census definitions and data; BLS series; company filings and profiles; trade-rule, regulatory, and market-research references), listed there in full.

1. Histometrics ingested ground-truth federal statistics, NAICS 313 (Textile Mills): receipts ~$27.02B, firms 1,461, HHI 144.7, CR4 19.3% / CR8 27.6% / CR20 41.9% / CR50 58.8% (U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census — Concentration); establishments 1,703, employees 79,765, annual payroll ~$4.17B, first-quarter payroll ~$1.09B (U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns, 2023). https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/economic-census.html; https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp.html
2. NAICS 3131 primer (Histometrics), "Fiber, Yarn, and Thread Mills (U.S.)" — receipts ~$6.64B, 250 establishments, 215 firms, 18,290 employees (CBP 2023) versus ~20,100 (BLS 2025), payroll ~$805M, value added $2.15B (Federal Reserve, 2022), HHI 952.5, CR4 54.2% / CR8 72.2% / CR20 86.3% / CR50 96%, SBA ceiling 1,250 employees; Unifi (NYSE: UFI) sole listed pure-play (~$571M FY2025 net sales, ~$70M market cap, REPREVE $174.9M ≈ 31% of sales, Americas gross loss margins 3.8% / 5.1% / 5.8% for FY2023–FY2025, repricing lag up to two quarters); private majors Parkdale (~29 plants; four U.S. closures 2024–2026 at Sanford and Walnut Cove NC, Mountain City TN, and Hillsville VA), American & Efird/Elevate (22 countries), National Spinning (shifting toward engineered nonwovens), Buhler (~100M lb/yr); cotton spun-yarn PPI 82.2 (June 2026) against a May 2022 base of 100; U.S. yarn exports ~$4.0B (2024); cotton mill use 1.9M bales in 2023/24 and exports >85% of U.S. raw-cotton demand; supply-chain employment ~471,000 and mills halved since 1997; yarn-forward/CAFTA-DR/USMCA (including the 2021 sewing-thread rule), Berry/Kissell, Section 301, de minimis (China May 2025; full repeal July 2027), USDA EAATM 3¢→5¢, OSHA cotton dust 29 CFR 1910.1043, EPA effluent guidelines. 2026.
3. NAICS 3132 primer (Histometrics), "Fabric Mills (U.S.)" — receipts ~$13.60B, 736 establishments, 651 firms, 40,117 employees, payroll ~$2.18B, HHI 151.3, CR4 17.6% / CR8 27.8% / CR20 45.9% / CR50 66.5%; four children — nonwoven ~$7.70B (~57%, HHI 322.8, ~$460K per worker), broadwoven ~$3.63B (~27%, HHI 441.9, 13,276 Census employees versus 18,412 BLS 2024), knit ~$1.29B (HHI 494), narrow ~$0.98B (HHI 385, payroll ~24% of receipts); broadwoven employment −84.8% (120,867 in 2000 → 18,412 in 2024) and the 2002 benchmark of 758 establishments / 80,530 employees / $11.4B shipments; knit −30% from 178 companies and 7,474 employees (2012); Schiffli from 357 firms and ~6,000 workers (1977) to well under 2,000 (2000); textile-mill workforce ~89,000 (2024) and supply chain 453,122 employees / $60.9B shipments (2025); Magnera (NYSE: MAGN, ~$3.2B FY2025 revenue, ~11% EBITDA margin, FY2025 net loss, top customer ~14% and top ten ~42%), Mativ, DuPont, Kimberly-Clark, Procter & Gamble, Amcor, Owens Corning, Johns Manville (~$725M nonwovens 2024), Indorama/Avgol, Toray, Suominen, Culp (~$204M FY2026; mattress-fabric segment ~$114M at 7.0% gross margin — listed as NYSE in the broadwoven child and NASDAQ in the knit child), Albany International (~$708M machine clothing), Best Pacific (HKEX 2111, ~$538M), Taiwan Paiho (TWSE 9938, ~US$400M), Avient (AVNT), Autoliv (ALV); private majors Milliken, Glen Raven ($250M expansion, >30% capability, >400 jobs), Elevate/Cone Denim (majority sale to Artistic Milliners expected Q1 2026), Mount Vernon Mills (~750 employees, six facilities), Beverly Knits, Apex Mills, Texollini (Hansae, 2024); Berry Global/Glatfelter (Nov. 2024) and Amcor–Berry (~$10.4B, Apr. 2025); raw materials ~60–70% of cost, line capex ~$30–50M, commodity PP gross margin ~25%; hygiene ~32% of nonwoven demand, durables 51% / disposables 49% of 2022 NA production, net imports 305,200 tonnes = 6.5% of regional production, global market ~$44B; meltblown ~368,000 tonnes (2020) → ~254,000 (2023); global webbing ~$4.2B (2023, APAC ~two-thirds) and narrow woven ~$4.9B by 2033; DoD textile/apparel procurement $2.3B (FY2021); 2024 total fertility rate 1,599.5 per 1,000 women; de minimis effective Aug. 29, 2025 (1.36 billion 2024 parcels); Berry Amendment 10 U.S.C. 4862 and the 2025 DLA proposal; FMVSS 209/302, 16 CFR 1610, AASHTO M288, WIPPES Act, EPA 40 CFR Part 410 and PFAS work, OSHA 29 CFR 1910.1043, BLS 2024 injury rate 2.2 per 100 full-time workers; "last ~100 cotton mills." 2026.
4. NAICS 3133 primer (Histometrics), "Textile and Fabric Finishing and Fabric Coating Mills (U.S.)" — receipts ~$6.79B, 717 establishments, 635 firms, 21,358 employees, payroll ~$1.18B, HHI 177.7, CR4 18.4% / CR8 27.6% / CR20 46.7% / CR50 68.5%, ~$318K per worker, ~$55K average pay, SBA ceiling 1,000 employees for both children; finishing ~$3.90B / 570 establishments / 501 firms / 14,366 employees / ~$270K per worker / HHI 386 / CR4 ~30% / CR50 ~79%, with receipts down from ~$4.9B (2017); coating ~$2.88B / 147 (CBP) or 153 (EC) establishments / 138 firms / 6,992 employees / ~$400K per worker / HHI 288.6 / CR4 24.7% / CR8 39.2% / CR50 88.7%; BLS detailed-industry productivity for NAICS 3133 — employment 26,400 (2024) → 21,800 (2025), output −4.0%, hours −17.3%; coating PPI (313320) 218.3 (Dec. 2020) → 297.4 (Apr. 2026), ~36%; IndexBox U.S. coated-fabric production ~$2.6B (2022) versus $2.884B Census; global coated fabrics ~$28–30B at ~5% CAGR with automotive ~33% and coated fabrics ~73% of the airbag-fabric market; U.S. technical textiles ~3.9% CAGR to 2030; digital printing water use cut up to ~95%; USDA cotton textile/apparel imports ~8.5B raw-fiber-equivalent lb (2025) versus ~0.8B lb domestic mill use; Culp (CULP), Unifi (UFI), Kornit (KRNT), Uniroyal (OTCQB: UNIR, ~$70M revenue; latest SEC annual filing fiscal 2021 at 12.4% gross and −2.1% operating margin), Saint-Gobain, Trelleborg, SergeFerrari, Surteco, SRF, Sioen, Freudenberg, Asahi Kasei, Toyobo, Toray, Seiren, Highland; Milliken (22 integrated U.S. Southeast plants, PFAS-free portfolio), Glen Raven, Mount Vernon Mills, Elevate, ~450 commission dyehouses, Seaman, Cooley, Herculite, Haartz, Morbern, Shawmut; Synthomer–Omnova (2020) and the Surteco sale effective February 2023, Sioen take-private (2021), Continental–ContiTech to Lone Star (announced July 4, 2026, €4.0B plus up to €250M, closing expected end-2026); EPA 40 CFR Part 410 (including the note that sites may keep discharging PFAS after ceasing use), fabric-coating NESHAP and polymeric-coating NSPS, California AB 1817 / Health & Safety Code §108971 and New York PFAS bans from Jan. 1, 2025 with 2027 thresholds, 16 CFR Part 1633, Berry Amendment, ~145% 2025 tariffs on Chinese textiles with U.S. textile output still −4% in 2025, OSHA 21 citations across 10 federal inspections (Oct. 2024–Sep. 2025). 2026.
5. U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census (receipts, firm counts, concentration) and 2023 County Business Patterns (establishments, employment, payroll), NAICS 313 / 3131 / 3132 / 3133. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/economic-census.html; https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp.html
6. National Council of Textile Organizations (NCTO), U.S. Textile Industry — Facts & Figures (shipments, supply-chain employment, yarn exports, trade-policy positions). https://ncto.org/facts-figures/us-textile-industry/
7. U.S. Department of Commerce (trade.gov) / USTR, Summary of CAFTA-DR and USMCA Textile Provisions (yarn-forward rules of origin; sewing-thread origin requirement effective 2021); the Berry Amendment. https://www.trade.gov/summary-cafta-fta-textiles; https://www.trade.gov/summary-usmca-fta-textiles; https://www.trade.gov/berry-amendment
8. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Marketing Service / Federal Register, Economic Adjustment Assistance for Textile Mills — Payment Rate (3¢ to 5¢ per pound, effective August 2025). https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/02/24/2026-03645/economic-adjustment-assistance-for-textile-mills-payment-rate
9. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Textile Mills Effluent Guidelines (40 CFR Part 410) — the one environmental rule cited by all three children, including the note that sites may continue discharging PFAS after ceasing use. https://www.epa.gov/eg/textile-mills-effluent-guidelines
10. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Detailed Industry Productivity (Productivity and Costs by Industry) — the series published natively at the four-digit level for NAICS 3131 (employment ~20,100, 2025) and NAICS 3133 (employment 26,400 → 21,800; output −4.0%; hours −17.3%). https://www.bls.gov/news.release/prin.htm