Fibre, yarn and thread mills

The pre-screen called this mill plant that has left the continent. Half right. The commodity end is closed, and the filing shows why: Unifi, the listed US maker of textured polyester and nylon yarn, reported fiscal 2026 net sales of $531.3M, down 7.0%, a 5.7% gross margin and a $24.6M net loss [A], having sold a manufacturing plant the year before and agreed after year-end to sell $60.0M of real estate. When the scale player cannot clear its costs at the import price, a new spinning frame will not. But the Canadian group is not that business. It booked $276.1M of revenue against $253.9M of expenses in 2024 [A], and its revenue has exceeded its expenses in every year since 2013 — these are specialty survivors, not commodity spinners. And half of the 44 establishments have fewer than ten employees, with eleven in Alberta and British Columbia, far from any textile cluster. The likeliest reading is custom fibre mills processing wool and alpaca for small flocks — that is inference from the size bands, not something the count states. That is the enterable proposition: second-hand carding and spinning equipment, a rural building, fleece arriving by the bag. The cut is market size. A custom mill is paid by the pound on what local flocks shear once a year, its ceiling is the throughput of one small line, and no published figure suggests the niche is wider than the handful of mills already in it.