Strategic Factor Analysis and Weight Determination for Textile Industry Production Relocation Decisions in CLMV Countries

Abstract

Production relocation in the textile industry represents a strategic decision that affects cost structure, competitiveness, and supply chain continuity, particularly in the context of CLMV countries, namely Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar, and Vietnam. These countries are geographically, commercially, and logistically connected with Thailand and have become potential destinations for labor-intensive manufacturing activities. This study aims to analyze the factors affecting production relocation decisions in the textile industry in CLMV countries and to determine the relative importance weights of those factors from expert perspectives. The study began with a review of literature related to factory location selection, international investment, and production relocation. A total of 28 factors were identified and classified into nine major dimensions: labor, laws and regulations, political conditions, quality of life, infrastructure, economy, environment, geography, and society. Data were collected from 23 experts using a five-point Likert scale questionnaire and analyzed using descriptive statistics, including mean and standard deviation. The ranked factors were subsequently converted into importance weights using three rank-based weighting methods: Rank Sum (RS), Rank Reciprocal (RR), and Rank Order Centroid (ROC). The findings indicate that wage cost was the most important factor affecting production relocation decisions. The next most important factors were natural disaster risk, tax benefits, incentives and subsidies, labor supply, and geographic location, respectively. The comparison of factor weights shows that RS, RR, and ROC produced generally consistent priority patterns. However, RR assigned a substantially higher weight to the top-ranked factor, whereas ROC generated a weighting pattern between RS and RR. The findings provide a systematic strategic decision-support framework for textile entrepreneurs and relevant agencies in evaluating key factors before relocating production bases to CLMV countries.