Interview with Mr G V Aras

Most of the existing players in the nonwovens industry have been using second hand or Chinese plants. These technologies are somewhat older or inferior but still useful as most of the products manufactured are in the lower end of the value chain like spun bond products. The equipment from Europe has found way in some projects where the market focus was mainly on Europe and USA for the end products.

The Indian nonwovens industry is much smaller in size compared to China and Taiwan. Perhaps we are at a stage where China was 10 years back. There are very few companies in India in this field who have a significant production volume, while there are many companies in the lower product range with smaller volume. In China, almost all the technologies in nonwovens are covered in production and covering domestic as well as export market. Within China even per capita nonwovens consumption is much higher than in India. In India Needle punched and spun laid products are mainly produced while spun lace production is surely growing after 3 new projects come up in India in the last 5 years.

We see major growth coming in from durable nonwovens, particularly for filtration, geo-synthetics and automotive. With likely Government initiative towards making use of nonwovens mandatory in infrastructure development, huge demand will be generated for geo-synthetics (for reinforcement, filtration, drainage purposes) in the coming years. Hygiene nonwovens (wipes, diapers, sanitary pads etc.) will certainly grow in the next few years due to likely increase in per capita income and increasing awareness.

Although there has been lot of talks on technical textiles including nonwovens, not much investment has happened so far in spite of good opportunities. Some of the reasons for this are higher initial investment in the capital machinery, bigger volume of production from the plant making it challenging to secure markets. From Government side enough initiatives have been taken in the right direction which includes special concessions under TUF, budgetary allocation for use of geo-textiles in road construction in North-East area, stricter norms for air polluting industries forcing them to use proper filtration media. Our recommendation is that Government should make use of technical textiles including non-wovens mandatory in the infrastructure development, which will not only increase the demand for geo-textile products but also will increase the life and quality of the roads etc.

I do not think that such a scenario is possible simply because India does not hold any advantage in this area as the plants are of high technology with higher production volumes and much lower labour requirement. Since the material produced is bulky, it makes it expensive for transportation out of the country and there is not enough demand in India to consume the production.

The pace of investment in new projects in the nonwovens field is quite slow so far. However, with more investment coming in infrastructure development as well as healthcare sector, certainly in the next few years more demand will be generated for plant and machinery.