Schoch Reeds Expands Weaving Accessories Portfolio

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Schoch Reeds Expands Weaving Accessories Portfolio

How was your experience at ITMA 2019? Our experience at ITMA 2019 has been good. We received good number of customers mainly from the corporate sector. We showcased some new products, which received very positive response during the exhibition. What new did you showcase? Schoch is famous in the reed business for all types of weaving machines. Now we have expanded our portfolio to include three new products - heald frames, heald wire, drop wire. We currently manufacture one type of heald wire. Gradually, we will move into more kinds of heald wires. For heald frames, Schoch Reeds has collaborated with Schroder, who is a long time player in the frames business. So, we will provide heald frames in name of Schoch & Schroder Talking a bit about our drop wires, the droppers are exclusively manufactured with tempered stainless steel quality SUS420J2. We have already started manufacturing drop wires in India. Custom-made solutions can be manufactured on demand. We have the advantage of manufacturing reeds in-house in Kolhapur itself. The new products will focus on better delivery time, and on providing quality products within India. Have you begun supplying in the Indian market? We've already started sales of all the new products. The response has been very good. In fact, when we started, we thought our current capacity will be enough for a year, but after just 3- 4 months we are planning to increase our capacity. So, in July- August we will go for capacity increase for drop wire. For heald frames, we are about to start assembling line and workshop in our existing plant. Revenues are growing at a rate of 15% per annum. Which are your important markets? Of course India. We are doing well in Bangladesh too. Besides at ITMA, we received a lot of enquries from Iran, Egypt, Mexico, Brazil. We currently export around 10-20% of our products to Europe, China, Bangladesh, Vietnam. How important is the Indian market for you? For us India is a very important market with a lot of potential. However, India is a very cost-conscious market, and this is the very reason we are manufacturing these products in-house. We will try to give the best quality to customers. Quality will be the main forte of these products. The other main advantage will be the after sales service. The customer will get the full technical support from local level itself. Who is your target customer - the corporate or the powerloom sector? It's not about any specific segment, but about the complexity of weaving. So it can be any kind of weaver who needs a quality-specific product for which he would need our accessories. It's a challenging environment where the weaver needs good accessories. And that is where we come in. So, as I say, our customers are both the corporate and the weavers in the decentralised sector. Are you in the OEM business too? Currently our OEM supplies are being done from Europe. We are OEM supplier to ITEMA for reeds.