Mr. Prasanta Deka, Head Market India, RIETER
“We decided to exhibit the concept rather than exhibiting the products. We focused mainly on digital optimization of a spinning plant, that this is the future and the second concept that we discussed with our customers was Sustainability. Everybody is talking about sustainability and processing of recycled fibre to make yarns, fabrics and finally apparels.”
How’s your experience in India ITME 2022?
This ITME exhibition has been quite important for us because it took place after six years, and it’s been a long time that we connected with the industry in person at one place and we were looking forward to it. We were a little bit apprehensive about the footfalls because of the location, but to our surprise, it worked out quite well.
Can you mention, what in particular you liked about this edition of India ITME?
Very good infrastructure, very good footfalls, many customers came and I think the theme for this whole exhibition was quite at par with any international show. Impressions from our customers are also that there are very happy to connect with their colleagues and their counterparts in the industry. And our impressions, yes, we also had the same feeling. Customers are in a very positive set of minds despite the pressing market we have today. The reason being many customers conveyed to us that they see the future to be very positive. We have an issue with the demand side, that probably will be tackled, or it’ll recover somewhere in Q1 of 2023. We see a good turnaround somewhere in the middle of 2023, and that’s a time when we will have ITMA 2023, Which we are looking forward to next year.
What are the new innovations you are exhibiting at ITME?
In ITME, we decided to exhibit the concept rather than exhibiting the products. Mainly because products can be shown anywhere whereas talking about certain concepts to the customers by large, exhibition is the right opportunity.
We focused mainly on digital optimization of a spinning plant, that this is the future and we shared with our customers what we are doing and what we’ll display in ITMA 2023. The second concept that we discussed with our customers was Sustainability. Everybody is talking about sustainability and processing of recycled fibre to make yarns, fabrics and finally apparels.
RIETER has invested substantially in this area. We are working with some partners and we shared with our customers what they can do with this technology, which will become very important in the next couple of years. The next priority is the product where we already have sufficient offerings which we innovated a couple of years back.
What are your plans for ITMA 23 in view of current market conditions?
We will have something new in ITMA 2023, apart from these concepts, which we are already talking about. Now, coming to the market, I already mentioned that we expect the market to pick up somewhere by mid of 2023, and we also hope that India’s own domestic cotton problem will be solved already by the beginning of 2023. We look forward to a very good future for our spinners.
Can you tell us about your plans for Indian markets?
RIETER as a company, we have already invested a lot in India. We are producing almost 60 to 70% of our product portfolio here in India.
We expect that the Indian government will come with certain policies, which will help machinery manufacturers. One bottleneck area we see under this Make in India drive is that, it’s not enough if we or any big company comes, we also need the entire periphery. We need this supply chain to build up across. For example, today we have to import many things like motors, sensors, control panels and many other critical items. We have been giving our feedback to the associations that we should incentivize these companies so that they come and invest and they grow around the bigger companies.
There are a lot of start-ups coming up in the industry, what are your views on this?
Yeah, we had seen a lot of start-ups coming up. We have seen many start-ups becoming successful and some facing challenges to sustain. From our side, we think that start-ups, it’s a good thing. I mean, when we look at our vendor base in Europe, most of the companies are only start-ups. They’re not big in size, they’re small, but they produce very high quality products, and they’re very sustainable with their business relations with bigger companies. I think we should follow the same, we should not immediately think very big, we should try to produce enough quantity with a very good quality level, develop our customer base. I think this will lead to really good survival and expansion of all start-ups. And we also look forward to many start-ups to come up in our own textile engineering field.
