Post quota era has brought sea changes in textile industry. To add to the competition resulted thereby, the urge for advance technology and state-of-the-art as well as globalisation remains the challenges for Asian textile makers. The obvious need to modernise operations in order to compete globally has spawned huge investment in quality machinery, especially, for China that has become a major manufacturing centre for textile products and the world's most dynamic market having one third of the global textile production capacity.

Envisaging this lucrative market opportunities for leading textile machinery manufacturers, a combined show ITMA ASIA + CITME 2008 came to existence to be held every two years in China, starting from 27 July 2008.

Sharing the objective behind support to this trade event, the policy maker and welfare activities planner in the textile trade of China, Mr Du Yuzhou, President of CNTAC (China National Textile and Apparel Council) comments: "For the 11th Five-Year Plan (from 2006-2010), China's textile industry will be focused on technical innovation and creation, development of Chinese own brands and increasing the added value of our products. All these must be carried out with advanced equipment. It is based on Chinas demand of advanced equipment and the outstanding achievements made by European textile machinery manufacturers, that we have decided to combine these two important events ITMA ASIA and CITME."

Expounding the rationale, President of CEMATEX- the owner company, Mr Edward Roberts describes - "China's textile industry has enjoyed a period of rapid growth and now has one third of the entire world textile production capacity. The country has become one of the largest buyers of textile machinery, which is one of the key reasons why CEMATEX made the important decision to move ITMA ASIA from Singapore to China. The date in 2008 has been chosen in order to enable us to react as quickly as possible to the changing requirements of the Asian market. We have decided to work on this event with CTMA (one of the owners of CITME) because they share our own objective of offering our exhibitors and their customers, high quality cost-effective exhibitions, and we are delighted that they are our partner in these combined ITMA ASIA+CITME shows."

Answering one of the 'WHYs & WHATs' by our inquisitive team, Ms Maria Avery, Secretary General, CEMATEX, also shares the idea behind selecting Shanghai as the venue and 2 years as the appropriate recursion span for the Fair. She elucidated: "China is the world's largest market and therefore all parties felt that the market needs a major show every two years instead of every four years. Shanghai is also the best location for the show because of its proximity to the main textile regions and its infrastructure."