CAPITAL GAINS.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: Statistical Data Included

An iconoclast who surrounds himself with technocrats, Allen Mebane shows the way U.S. textiles can still win.

Nightfall is near. Rob Snyder leans over the side of a massive, windowless building flanked by missile-like storage silos. In the distance, Pilot Mountain's summit juts out of the foothills. "It's always windy up here," he half shouts as wind rushes down from the Blue Ridge Mountains. Stray polyester chips the size of match heads blow across the rooftop. Five stories up, he opens a door and heat gushes out. Down metal stairs, polished ducts run through gratework floors to machines farther below.

In them, chips from the silos are melting as augers squeeze molten polyester through extruders. Pressure builds. Resin streams like spider webs from holes in metal disks called spinnerets. Another floor down, the strands -- 34 to 96 at a time -- are twisted into yarn, whirling onto spools at 180 miles an hour. "Hell of a winder," Snyder yells, pausing at one machine. "We're the only company in the world making polyester yarn at 5,000 meters a minute." He's interrupted by a beeping from behind.

An AGV -- automated guided vehicle -- the size of a subcompact car approaches, yellow lights flashing. Radio signals from wires in the floor tell it to pause at a winder. "They're talking," shouts Snyder, as the machines exchange optical signals. Extending its arm, the AGV picks up a half-dozen 45-pound reels of yarn and moves on. Finally, a laser burns inventory codes inside each reel, with faint puffs of smoke, before other robots pack them for storage and shipping.

Each week, 4 million pounds of texturized polyester yarn roll out of Plant Five in Yadkinville. Analysts say it's the world's most automated yarn plant -- actually two plants that went into production in 1997 and '98, one for spinning yarn, the other for texturizing it. Snyder, the general manager, oversees Wal-Mart-sized production floors, manned only by machines and robots.

Sixty miles away in Greensboro, Allen Mebane, 70, chairman of Unifi Inc., beams when talking about his $275 million space-age complex. It's the signature piece of a man who embraced technology when Microsoft's Bill Gates was in junior high, a blue blood who refuses to do things the old-fashioned way. He started bucking tradition in college, spurning N.C. State's vaunted textile school for the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science -- he left before graduating but was awarded an honorary doctorate in 1986 -- and is still taking the road less traveled as he nears retirement.

In January, he decided to replace himself as CEO, not with his son, head of Unifi Technical Fabrics, a spinoff specializing in nonwoven fabrics used in surgical gowns and diapers, or a fellow Tar Heel, but an Irishman. When Mebane met him in the mid-'80s, Brian Parke was buried under four layers of management at Lirelle Ltd., a failing yarn plant in Donegal that Unifi eventually bought. Six months after the purchase, he was running it and eventually turned it around, helping Unifi establish a beachhead in Europe. Most recently, he was Unifi's chief operating officer. "He's got global vision," Mebane says with a shrug. "Where...