摘要：The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) textile and clothing firms had been facing multiple challenges of competitiveness. During the last past ten years the industry has dramatically declined and the only firm under review has managed to secure its survival by concentrating on niche markets. The previous situation is principally due to infrastructural challenges, second hand products, institutional instability, illegal imports from the East Asian countries and other internal problem. Here, special attention is given to La Société Textile de Kisangani (SOTEXKI), the only survival company in the DRC textile and clothing industry. This paper tries to explore the reasons why this survival company in the DRC textile industry continuously cope with these low cost competitions by looking at what works in the industry, why and what can be done to make things work better? It proposes to look at the different production paradigms (labour issues and value added production paradigm) by exploring their effectiveness to promote the textile industry’s survival and competitiveness. It then discusses some of the findings about this survival company in the DRC textile industry. In brief, an exploratory result from the fieldwork revealed the pertinence of involving in best labour practices and value added production paradigm to promote competitiveness and keeping the firm survival. Further results indicated that SOTEXKI as an integrated industry with significant forward and backward linkages focuses on value added production paradigms and keeps consistently complying to the best labour practices to remain survival and competitive. SOTEXKI is quite performing well.
关键词：Survival; competitiveness; industry; labour cost cutting; retrenchment; and value added production paradigm
