European technical textile industry is moving towards the more vibrant markets of Asia, and especially India, where there are good opportunities in geotextiles, automobile textiles and medical textiles.

Speaking to technicaltextile.net, Mr. Hendrik van Delden, Managing Director of TechTex consultancy Gherzi van Delden GmbH, said, “The aspiration behind European firms shifting to India is rather the attractiveness of the Indian market for technical textiles than adding another low labour cost plant to the existing industrial footprint.”

According to him, the Indian market offers good opportunities in geotextiles because of the large scale infrastructure investments taking place in India.

“The other sectors that offer good market opportunities in India are automobile textiles, because of India’s substantial and growing automobile industry, and hygiene and medical textiles due to India’s large population and growing middle class,” says Mr. Hendrik.

“Sectors like agro textiles and building textiles are also catching international attention from companies focusing on these segments,” he adds.

Informing about shortcomings of Indian technical textile companies, he says, “There are only a few Indian technical textile firms today that have a significant exposure on the world market, so the international awareness of Indian strengths and capabilities in technical textiles is limited.”

He advises students to choose technical textiles as their field of study and professional career as the industry offers many technically and commercially challenging tasks to be mastered in the context of on-going worldwide innovation in this sector.

Moreover, new technologies and advanced materials are being introduced through the technical textiles sector, which will contribute to improvement in health, safety and value added per capita of the Indian population.