June month of 2009 saw two major trade fairs in the Textile Machinery field. One held in heart of textile city in Istanbul, Turkey and other at Shanghai. Due to global recessionary scenario people were skeptical about success of these fairs in terms of visitation. Fibre2fashion tried to take a review on performance of both these important trade fairs as follows.

ITM - 2009, Turkey

ITM 2009, which was held in textile country, Turkey, is supposed to be one of the important shows in textile industry. Held between 6-10 June, the show attracted approximately 1000 participants despite global recessionary scene. Out of 31,000 buyers who visited this fair, 4000 were visitors from foreign countries. Visitors from approximately 59 countries had appeared in the fair to find out appropriate product for their requirement.

A large bunch of visitors were from the Middle East countries as Turkey is a convenient and central place for visitors from neighboring countries as they dont have to face Visa related problem like fairs organized in European countries plus this is convenient place for them to visit from distance perspective too.

ITM hosted almost all kinds of machinery for textile production and visitors shown interest in state of the art machinery from different categories like model fiber spinning, yarn, weaving, knitting, hosiery, dyeing-print-finishing technologies. But amongst all categories finishing machinery stalls were more crowded and witnessed greater curiosity of visitors.

Turkish manufactures shown great proficiency by developing state of the art machinery which has latest features competitive with their European counterpart.

Visitation by statistics

As per official statistics Maximum visitors were from Dyeing, Printing and finishing sector which constituted approximately 29% of total visitation. Sector to receive second highest visitors was knitting machinery sector with approximately 13% visitation. Weaving sector witnessed 9% visitation followed by home textile with 8.29% visitation.

After Turkey, Iran was the country from where maximum number of visitors attended the show constituting approximately 20%. Iran was followed by Syria with 18% visitation and by Egypt with 6% visitation. According to visitation numbers Bulgaria was on 4^th place followed by India.

Fibre2fashion spoke with Mr. Kamal Shah (GM-Exports, Prashant Gamatex Private Limited) who visited ITM, 2009 to know his views about the show.

When asked about his overall views about the show he explained show was excellent considering facilities and amenities provided. Although he didn't find visitation numbers much impressive and said visitors were bit less in numbers than expected. Although he felt visitors profile were quite satisfactory as senior executives working with mills and owners of companies were present in the show.

He also noted that visitors from outside Turkey were also in considerable amount. Visitors from countries like Jordan, Syria and Uzbekistan were present in good numbers although, not much visitors appeared from country like Pakistan.