Boom Time for the Going-Broke Industry Harf Zimmermann for The New York Times Mike Diamond at Republic Textile in York, S.C. Inside Republic Textile Equipment's 60,000-square-foot warehouse, industrial-scale knitting equipment stands beside fabric-testing paraphernalia, which is next to printing machines and countless bins of spare parts. All of it, the remnants of factories and businesses gone bust, belongs to Mike Diamond, who has spent the last 50 years making a living in an industry that, for lack of a gentler term, might be called the going-broke business. There's a market for used equipment from shuttered companies. The ""going broke"" business is the fulcrum between the decline of textiles here and their rise in Asia. Technology is always new somewhere. On a recent morning, Diamond was leading a tour of his facility for a client named Gamal Omar, who had traveled to York, S.C., from Egypt for, among other things, some discount shopping. Omar owns a fabric-and-apparel-manufacturing business in 10th of Ramadan City, and like virtually everyone in the apparel business, he struggles with competition from Asia. Buying new machinery is out of Omar's budget, but older technologies bring productivity and quality problems. To remain competitive, he needs late-model textile machinery at used-car prices. And so he makes the trip to South Carolina about once each year. Diamond, 73, walked Omar around his warehouse, extolling the virtues and histories of various contraptions. Omar looked at an Italian fabric-cutting machine from Main Knitting, a Montreal-based company that was once Canada's largest producer of men's underwear. Then Diamond showed him knitting equipment from a shuttered Vanity Fair lingerie factory. There was dyeing machinery from a shuttered South Carolina facility belonging to Delta Woodside, and a variety of lab equipment that tested everything from yarn strength to colorfastness. After about an hour, they stopped at a dozen or so sewing machines. "Five hundred dollars each," Diamond said. I'll throw in the chairs. Unlike failed dot-coms or hedge funds, factories don't vanish overnight. In my years studying the textile industry, executives of failed companies almost always told me that they saw the end coming. And that when it came, they needed help. "Most people don't have a clue how to go broke," Diamond told me. Going broke is a business. You've got to know your suppliers. You've got to know your customers. The going-broke business in the textile industry is clustered around the I-85 corridor, from Gastonia, N.C., to Greenville, S.C. Diamond has three major competitors in the area and dozens of smaller ones, but he's still been able to put five kids through college ("all at the same time," he says proudly) and acquire a significant art collection. He competes by staying on top of the constantly shifting manufacturing technologies - knowing which machines will have a second life somewhere else and which ones he should sell as scrap metal. These days, he says, 95 percent of the demand is from outside the U.S. I sat with Diamond one morning as he chewed a cigar and leafed through a stack of about 30 printed e-mails - from Pakistan, China, Indonesia, Bangladesh and India - and dispensed orders to his assistant about what to do with each request. Sometimes Diamond had the machinery that a customer wanted; other times, he knew where to find it. And there were occasions when he knew that the customers didn't really need what they thought they wanted. He knows from experience. Diamond joined his father in the going-broke business more than half a century ago. In its early years, Republic was based in New York, in proximity to the Northern textile factories that were closing. Diamond closed his first factory in his early 20s, staying in Shamokin, Pa., for six months to sell off the pieces­ of a plant that made fabric for bras and girdles. In 1972, Republic moved to South Carolina to follow the movement of the textile industry from New England to the Piedmont region. Soon after, Diamond started selling used textile machinery to Gamal Omar's father in Egypt.