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'With Our Technological Developments We Aim To Make The Domestic Textile Industry More Competitive'

• By  Textile Excellence
• December 09, 2022

Indigenous innovation has been the key to Weavetech's growth strategy since its inception. In an exclusive interview with Textile Excellence, Chintan Thumar, Executive Director, Alidhra Weavetech, talks about the changing mindset of the textile industry towards Indian technology.

Tell us about how successful you have been in making in India?

Alidhra Weavetech is one of India's topmost twisting, winding and weaving machinery makers with a global reach. We offer innovative and cost-effective solutions in twisting and weaving, making us the technology partner of choice for leading Indian companies with global ambitions. Over the years, we have had several superlative performances, including many patented technologies and many firsts for the Indian market. We have exciting data that proves that we’ve been considerably successful in replacing foreign machines with our indigenously developed machines. The data strongly suggests that no customer of ours, who went for expansion, has gone back to the foreign machines. This has been a very encouraging achievement that keeps our team motivated to continue developing indigenous solutions.

How did Alidhra face competition from established world players, and the mindset of mills that European technology is better.

From the beginning, we realised that the decision making process of companies in the organised sector is completely different from those in the unorganised sectors. The organised sector, where direct involvement of investors and top management was missing, were less likely to be open to new ideas, developments and logical reasoning. Most organised sector teams are driven more by perception and have a sense of complacency. Comparatively, the unorganised sector is driven more by logical reasoning rather than perception and are willing to take more risks on new concepts and new developments. Such vibrant unorganised sector provided us the boost that helped us introduce highly valuable and cost-effective solutions designed specifically for the Indian market. Seeing such fierce competition from unorganised sector players and the reasons why they became so competitive, gradually gave confidence to large organised sector companies to break their perception-barriers towards Indian brands. Though filament yarn segment has completely shifted to Indian machineries, the spun yarn segment still has a long way to break the barriers of perception and complacency.

How ahead in terms of technology and market reach are you compared to international competitors. And how did you achieve this?

In specific segments like yarn twisting, we’ve matched the technologies of our global peers. But in terms of market reach, there’s still a lot of work to be done. We believe that export of value-added end-products works in better interest of the country rather than exports of machineries. Hence, our focus has been more on making the domestic industry more competitive in their end products rather than being competitive in machinery exports.

How has Alidhra emerged successful in this very competitive field?

Focus on market and application specific machines, rather than a general versatile can-do-all machines, has been a key value in our competitive strategy. This strategy has served us well in the past and we believe, it’ll continue to be highly helpful for us in future.

What has prevented other Indian textile machinery manufacturers from achieving similar success? Your message for them.

Collaboration rather than competition is truly the way forward for the Indian textile engineering industry. There’s a huge gap in the entire vertical that is not being served by the domestic industry. Our teams at our dedicated R&D centre have worked with a lot of entrepreneurs and consultants in the industry to bring ideas and visions to reality. We are always looking for opportunities to collaborate with our peers to identify and respond to new opportunities by offering our infrastructure facilities and expertise.

Where do you envision Indian textile engineering industry in the next five years?

The “Make in India” campaign and encouraging PLI schemes have infused a never before seen excitement for growth. The current administration has been highly supportive in understanding the need of the engineering industry, while realising that the long-term competitive advantage of any industry can only be sustained if the underlying capital goods industry is also competitive. Due to a very small export market, the growth of the Indian textile engineering industry is very closely linked with domestic Indian textile industry. Since the textile industry is expected to grow in double-digits over the next decade, we strongly believe that a similar growth trend will be seen in the textile engineering industry as well.

The “Make in India” campaign and encouraging PLI schemes have infused a never before seen excitement for growth. The current administration has been highly supportive in understanding the need of the engineering industry, while realising that the long-term competitive advantage of any industry can only be sustained if the underlying capital goods industry is also competitive.