Where does H&M actually make its clothes? We counted the factories
The H&M label on a shirt tells you the retailer. The small country-of-origin label tells you one country. Neither tells you much about the network behind the rack.
We downloaded H&M Group's August 2026 supplier workbook and counted its factory entries by location. There are 1,547 factory rows across 32 countries and regions. Mainland China has 466 rows, Türkiye 278 and India 220.
That is a count of listed facilities. It is not a ranking of where H&M buys the most clothes.
The factory count has a surprise
Bangladesh has 188 rows, behind those first three locations. Yet H&M identifies China and Bangladesh as its largest clothing production markets.
Those statements can both be true. A list of addresses does not tell you how many shirts come out of each address. One large garment factory can produce more than several small facilities, and a processing plant is doing a different job from a sewing factory.
Counts include manufacturing, processing and component facilities. They do not measure purchase value or clothing output.
Download all 32 country and region counts (CSV).
Why our total is bigger than a headline factory number
The workbook includes different facility types. We found 998 rows whose Factory Type field includes “Manufacturing unit.” Other rows describe processing or component work, and a single factory can list more than one function.
We counted each populated country-and-factory row once. The 1,547 factory name and address pairs are unique in this edition. We kept H&M's country and region labels as published. We did not convert factory counts into purchase shares or merge them with a different year's production figures.
This is also an H&M Group workbook. It does not give a separate country breakdown for every H&M-branded garment, COS product or other group brand. A shopper cannot use the chart to identify the factory behind a particular item.
Follow the product, not just the country
For a specific garment, start with its label and product information. Then look for a disclosed factory or supplier connected to that product. A factory address is useful evidence when the product connection is established.
A long supplier list, by itself, cannot make that final connection. Nor can a ship leaving a country prove that the goods were manufactured there. Origin, factory location and port of loading answer different questions.
Our Thailand check shows why that distinction matters: the current factory workbook and an older fibre-supplier disclosure tell different parts of the story.
Data and method
Source edition: August 2026 Ver1.2, downloaded on 28 October 2026. We read the SUPPLIER LIST worksheet, excluded its header, and counted rows with a country and factory name. The chart includes manufacturing, processing and component facilities, rather than a tier-1-only subset.
Download the full country count as CSV or the summary and source checksum as JSON. Our reproduction command is python scripts/build-consumer-story-data.py suppliers.xlsx --check in the FreightStow source checkout, using the linked workbook. The checksum prevents a changed source file from silently replacing this edition.