National Textiles Closes Hodges Yarn Mill and Near-by Steam Plant

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Researched by Industrialinfo.com (Industrial Information Resources, Incorporated; Houston, Texas). In the continuing saga of Where Has All Our Textile Industry Gone?, the next chapter begins with the proximate closing of a 500,000 square foot, 400-employee yarn-spinning mill belonging to National Textiles LLC (Winston-Salem, North Carolina).

The mill in question is located at 5421 Highway 25, in Hodges, Greenwood County, South Carolina, one of ten production facilities National Textiles acquired from Sara Lee in 1998. The physical facility is for sale, and the company plans to move some of the equipment and machinery to other National Textile plants. Some of the equipment has already been sold, and some remains to be sold at this writing. Closing at the same time, at the end of June, will be a steam-producing facility, right down the road, at 5501 State Highway 25 in Greenwood, which has been in operation since about 1934. The steam plant owned and operated by Trigen-Biopower (Charlotte, North Carolina) is a wood waste-fired plant.

The company launched a $5 million project in 2004 to upgrade the plant with new production equipment, machinery, and controls, and had apparently tentatively planned another upgrade for the 2005-2006 timeframe, which, of course, is no longer in effect. Industrialinfo.com had reported on both those projects.

National Textiles makes open-end and ring-spun cotton, cotton-polyester blend yarns, knit fabrics, finished tubular fabrics, and cut parts, primarily for garment-maker Hanes Industries Incorporated (Conover, North Carolina), a subsidiary of Sara Lee Branded Apparel (Winston-Salem, North Carolina), a business segment of Sara Lee Corporation (NYSE:SLE ) (Chicago, Illinois), whom nobody supposedly doesn't like - except, possibly, for the workers who will be negatively impacted by the closure. And so, another U.S. textile plant bites the dust.

National Textiles was formed in 1998 as a spin-off of Sara Lee Branded Apparel.

The company has said that due to the low unit cost of the items it makes and the highly competitive nature of the industry, it finds it necessary to close the Hodges plant, in order to maintain a competitive advantage through operational efficiency.

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