Interview with Paige Mullis

Obviously, there are many challenges to doing business in India as a foreigner. We have had a very successful experience with our joint venture partners in Strata Geosystems India, which is the leading manufacturer of geosynthetics in India dealing with soil reinforcement in roadway and retaining wall applications. We started this company from a zero base in 2004, and it is now an industry powerhouse. We not only manufacture and install our products and designs throughout India, we are also exporting to more than a dozen countries on 5 continents. So we see many future possibilities for enjoying similar success with other technical textiles. It is just a matter of timing.

We are only exploring the technical textile market in India at this time, and bringing our portable Concept Gallery to Mumbai for a few days through our subsidiary Strata Geo systems India Pvt Ltd. The purpose of this is to explore the potential for collaboration and innovation with a combination of many products and processes that we are involved with globally. Let the creative juices flow!

We think it is at a nascent stage, with many application driven opportunities to consider. Producing high performance fabrics is a challenging endeavour, but finding the correct marketing plan, distribution network, inventory management system, and long range vision is even more daunting. Glen Raven has gone through this process multiple times during our 134 year history in a number of different countries, and we are actively engaged in this evaluation for the Indian market.

This will happen for sure. But it is a very different mindset from the commodity textile industry, and requires significant investment and foresight to capture the technical and premium values that are being added. To be candid, it is not for the faint hearted.

Yes, we certainly do. India's focus on "Make in India" is certainly aligned to our mainstay statement - "Let Endless Opportunities Begin".

By their very nature, technical textiles will always be a smaller volume segment of the whole textile industry. However, it is a space that offers many opportunities to market specialised value added products, and capture a significant market share.

India has a world class pool of highly competent technical employees and an improving infrastructure albeit, slowly developing, to handle the demands of technical textile production. What seems to be lacking, is the understanding of the demand applications and the need for extremely high quality production and advanced marketing in this sector. But it will come.

We do not participate in these commodity markets, so we have no position on this.