Karl Mayer is an innovative market leader as well as driving force in the textile machinery building. The manufacturer offers perfect solutions for the fields of warp knitting and flat knitting, technical textiles, warp preparation for weaving and digitalisation. Â Kevin Socha, Managing Director, Karl Mayer- Hong Kong, highlights the innovations at India ITME 2022 and how is the company planning to expand in India.
Kindly brief us about your company. And what are you focusing on at India ITME 2022?
Here, we are representing various offerings from the warp knitting, weaving preparations, technical textiles and also flat knitting segments. We are also presenting solutions from KMON which producing software solutions for the whole textile industry. Care Solutions is also one of our exhibits. This is a kind of a development or fusion of spare parts or service business. We have tried to increase actual customer care which we provide to our customers.
How was 2022 for you? What are your expectations from 2023?
India is one of the biggest and most significant markets for the Karl Mayer Group. This is another reason we established our manufacturing facility here. We anticipate that the textile sector will expand this year, and we anticipate growing together over here. We experienced a stall in the business to the pandemic, but we are now hopeful that things will start to pick up again.
Sustainability (including circularity) and automation (digitalisation) seem to be the buzz words in the industry. How is your company gearing up for these 2 trends?
Regarding recycling, we already have clients using Karl Mayer warp knitting equipment to produce recycled fibre. This initiative is anticipated to expand. It’s still early, and the fibre availability isn’t that high. Recycled synthetic materials can be handled by our machinery. We expect that the proportion will increase as these recycled fibres become more widely available. I think recycled yarn is also used frequently in the flat knitting technique. Our knitting machines can easily process green fibre. The machines are excellent at handling green fibre in all of our divisions.
You will notice a lot more redevelopment in ITMA. We will demonstrate our innovations there with a focus on sustainability.
What are your growth plans? (in terms of capacity expansion, exports, foraying into new textile segments/applications, new product developments/launches, etc)
We have long believed that the Indian markets hold immense potential, thus in 2009 we founded Karl Mayer India. Karl Mayer Textile Machinery India is now the name of this company. Therefore, we are already manufacturing more machines in India than we were previously, and we intend to increase this number. We are planning to export machineries from India to other countries soon. We plan to increase our manufacturing capability here and provide machines not only to India but also to other countries, like some of our other co-producers. Our customers appreciate our successful domestic infrastructure delivery and are pleased with the results. The customer satisfaction makes us very happy. We are here and expect to increase our footprint in the next years as part of our commitment to the Indian market.