Mumbai based Khosla Profil Pvt. Ltd. Was laid in the year 1979 by Pramod K. Khosla, the CEO of the company. The company is India’s only composite manufacturing plant having state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities right from Fiber to Made-ups. With an area of 1.5 Lac sq. meters, we are outfitted with highly advanced and modern machineries. In an exclusive with Pramod K. Khosla, CEO of Khosla Profil Pvt. Ltd and Chairman of Indian Technical Textile Association (ITTA) spoke to Textile Value Chain, about the remarkable growth the company has gained in the last 40 years under his leadership and share his views on nonwoven market.
So far how has the journey been for you and Khosla Profile? where do you see Khosla in next 5 to 10 years?
So far my journey has been marvelous. I started by career with RSWM in 1977 with polypropylene yarn filtration. Thirty eight years back, I started Khosla Profile with woven filter fabrics. The company has now also started emerging in nonwoven by completing the filtration basket with woven to nonwovens.
For nonwoven the demand is picking up and booming. After 2 years of planning we started our own nonwoven unit in 2016 with an investment of 200 crores and in the next two years we plan to open another two.
Do you find scope for nonwoven is India
Yes, nonwoven has tremendous scope in India. CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of nonwoven is far higher than woven market. In nonwoven, medical, agriculture, hygiene, automobile, geo-textile etc has a very huge scope to grow.
What’s your market share in nonwoven and any new applications in the area?
In liquid filtration we are the market leaders while in dust collection we have just begun. So it’s less than 5%, it will become much more substantial in future. Indian market is much more competitive as Chinese companies are exporting raw material to India.
We are in process to make a new fabric for swimming pools, Paint shops etc. it’s all under R&D.
Could you elaborate on your product range, pricing and USP?
We have many products in filtration both in liquid and dust collection. We do make all types of filtration fabrics for chemical, dyes, pharmaceuticals , cements etc. As far as pricing is concerned, it depends upon the quality of the product and characteristics. We have kept our pricing reasonable according to the product technology.
Our USP is in liquid filtration, as we are the first ones in our country to apply certain advanced technology in this segment and that is our advantage. We offer products which are different in terms of dimensional, stability, coefficient variation percentage is lowest from others because finishing technology is very much new in the world.
Could you tell us about dust collection application area?
Dust collection bag is used to collect dust mainly from chimneys, boilers, cement factory, power plant, chemical factories etc. In India, dust release in the air from these plants and factories is 40 milligram while china has brought it down to 10 milligram. Indian government has become very vigilant with the air pollution in the metropolitan cities like Mumbai, Delhi etc. If our government enforces rules on the -air pollution than the demand generation would be vice versa.
How do you R&D for products and how much you invest in it?
At Khosla Profil all R&D is done in house, we don’t hire any consultants nor have a joint venture. We don’t outsource any type of work whether it is for woven or nonwoven. All designs are done under our own supervision.
Where investment is part of concerned, we don’t have any such percentage of investment done on R&D, as ‘we are like a laboratory which also manufactures’. We continuously innovate many new products throughout the year.
What is your opinion on for CoE activities in nonwoven?
There is definitely a huge scope for Centers of Excellence (CoE). In each area of nonwoven they are going to start some awareness through seminars. Industrialists were not taking as much advantage of DKTE, so CoE had to bring awareness among industries for their facilities and development. Usage of nonwoven such as geo-textile, automotive, filter & hygiene are growing day by day as usage increase, demand will also increase. So, CoE needs to educate consumer as well as industry.
