The same workers will return to the same Fall River mill, bent over the same machines that have churned out fabric and yarn for decades.

But the Canadian firm that acquired the Quaker Fabric Corp. on Thursday says it is confident it can spin gold from a six-decade-old business that withered under high labor costs and relentless pressure from foreign competitors.

Less than three months after Quaker abruptly turned its humming plant into a silent symbol of the suffering U.S. textile industry, Quebec-based Victor Innovatex is racing to repopulate the mill and restart its equipment.

Armed with an order backlog it inherited from Quaker, it hopes to begin production before the end of the year.

But the 60-year-old, privately held company says it does not plan to replicate Quaker’s business model.

“We don’t want to fail the way they failed,” Jean-Pierre Simard, a Victor spokesman in Quebec, said yesterday. “We don’t want to repeat the story.”

Over the last five years, Quaker sales plummeted from $365.44 million to $151.66 million — a 58-percent decline that it blamed on falling trade barriers and a flood of cheap Asian imports.

With its acquisition of Quaker, Victor hopes to compete in that market, entering the residential furniture business by supplying some of Quaker’s large retail customers, such as Crate&Barrel and La-Z-Boy. It also hopes to push into the fast-growing outdoor furniture business, which Quaker recently entered.

For now, the majority of Victor’s sales involve supplying fabric for office furniture and for the panels that form office cubicles.

But in an interview yesterday, Victor’s chief financial officer, Serge Laurier, said Victor plans to handle large-volume orders through contractors abroad, in countries where production costs, particularly labor, are far lower.

It has already established partnerships in China, where it has handled requests for lower-cost products in the past, Laurier said.

In Fall River, Victor will concentrate on high-end fabrics, Simard said. In particular, it is trying to expand further into the hospitality industry, supplying elegant and richly textured materials for furniture at upscale hotels and resorts.

Victor does not disclose its annual sales. But Laurier said 65 percent of revenue comes from the cubicle-panel business, 25 percent from office chairs and the remainder from newer customers in the hospitality and health-care industries.

The company’s customers include Herman Miller Inc., Allsteel Inc. and Haworth Inc.

The distributors who buy Victor’s high-end fabrics, Laurier said, are less price sensitive than retailers of residential furniture.

Their priorities, Laurier said, are rapid delivery, innovative design and durability. And they are willing to pay for it, he said, enough to cover the costs of manufacturing in New England.

“We will focus domestic production on high-end, high-margin products,” Laurier said. “Products that require quick response time and delivery time, there’s a market for that.

“If you want to have volume and low-end products, that is something you can source elsewhere,” Laurier said. “In the higher-end market, price is not the thing that is most important.”

Quaker also made high-end fabric, producing a widely known Jacquard upholstery line. But most of its residential products competed directly with low-cost imports from China.

It is not clear how much pressure the acquisition will put on Victor’s finances.

The company has declined to discuss what it paid to acquire most of Quaker’s assets, including all of its inventory, machinery, equipment and intellectual property, such as trademarks and design archives. It also purchased most of Quaker’s real estate.

Quaker’s accounts receivable, its subsidiaries in Brazil and Mexico and its warehouse in Mississippi were not part of the deal. The package also excluded a 60-acre parcel Quaker owned off Route 24, in an area known as Bleachery Pond.

That property was bought for $2.6 million by the Atlantis Charter School, in Fall River. Yesterday, the school held a “signing ceremony” to announce the deal, first reported in The Providence Journal last month.

“The acquisition involves one of the largest remaining undeveloped tracts in the city. Atlantis is excited about its purchase and the opportunity to continue to provide an excellent education to tomorrow’s leaders using a new and modern facility. After 13 years of saving pennies, holding bake sales and hosting golf tournaments, prudent financial planning has allowed Atlantis to take a gigantic step towards realizing the vision of combined modern, state of the art, eco-friendly campus that will welcome all our current and future students,” said Roger H. Saint-Pierre, the chairman of the board of trustees.

“The announcement of our purchase, along with yesterday’s decision by Victor Innovatex Textiles to begin operation at the former Quaker property on Davol Street, is a clear indication that there’s a bright future for Fall River. That future will be shaped by providing a great education to all the city’s children which will help to attract new businesses and new jobs,” added Saint-Pierre.

Victor bought Quaker’s property from The Gordon Brothers Group, which had acquired it earlier from Quaker. Gordon Brothers paid Quaker $27 million, according to court documents Quaker filed as part of bankruptcy proceedings.

Given the scope of the real estate and equipment, Laurier said yesterday, Victor’s purchase was relatively “conservative.” The company, meanwhile, is hiring only 100 workers for the Fall River factory, one-ninth the staff Quaker employed.

“The business we’re going to start is going to be a scaled-down version of Quaker,” Laurier said. “We believe we can make money there.

“We have grown very fast over the last few years,” Laurier said. “We don’t have enough capacity right now. I think this is going to work out very well for us.”

bgedan@projo.com