We are evaluating whether to manufacture parts on-site in India
Rolf Gaenz, Managing Director of leading German automation service provider AC-Automation, shares information about its clientele all over the world, its growth in various markets, and the latest trends dominating the automation industry with Fibre2Fashion.
What has been your growth percentage in the last two years? What is the targeted growth for the next fiscal?
Luckily, the request for our automation systems has been very high in the past five years. Our turnover has been growing in a two-digit range every year due to the high-order income. We hope that the industry will continue to walk on the track of automation due to strong upward revaluation of currencies against the Euro. There are interesting projects worldwide, and we would be very happy to be able to generate many orders from these projects.
What are the qualities that distinguish AC Automation's products from your competitors' in Germany and elsewhere globally?
AC-Automation is the only German supplier in the market. Therefore, we focus on providing the highest German standards regarding quality, on-time delivery, on-site services as well as continued customer support for customised automation solutions in the man-made fibre industry.
Which countries are your biggest clients? Where does India figure?
We have delivered systems worldwide over the last 25 years. In the past five years, the main business was done in China and India. Although the Chinese man-made fibre market is significantly larger than India's, the order volume was about equal in both countries for our company.
With a lot of growth coming in from the Asian markets, are there any plans to set up office in any Asian country?
We already have teams working for us in India as well as China, which we will continue to enlarge. We are evaluating whether to manufacture parts on-site in India at the moment. In China, we are already doing so, and have been making very good experiences.
What are the latest trends in automation across the textile value chain that you cater to?
The trend we can clearly see is that customers building new plants are requesting fully automatic operation from the beginning to save cost for manual labour. This is a definite change compared to the past years where the focus had been on partial automation of already existing plants. AC-Automation's focus is always to provide exactly the automation level requested by our customers.
In Asia, who is your biggest client?
Our customers worldwide include mostly the big players of the market. For these customers, we improved the traditional concepts and developed new handling solutions with even higher efficiency, which are providing a much shorter ROI to our customers.
What is the kind of R&D that your company invests in to come up with better and improved versions for the textile industry?
We are constantly working on new developments and making improvements on our existing equipment. Large investments have been made in the application of the latest state-of-the-art information technology (IT) to shorten delivery times for our customers and complete installation simulation upon order placement to considerably minimise commissioning times on site.
Which is your best selling product and in which countries is the demand the most?
Since we are a provider for entire solutions and not just single equipment, we can only distinguish between two main trends:
- Fully-automatic installations in China with bobbin warehouses including doffing, transport to storage, and automatic packing from there.
- Semi-automatic solutions in India including doffing onto creel carts and packing from there.
Which areas in textile production are you looking to automate in the next few years? What will be the benefits?
We consider ourselves to be a provider for complete systems, always adapting to the latest market requirements. This means - as in the past already - depending on the customer needs, we provide exactly the equipment requested by the customer and develop the perfectly fitting solution for each and every single application. Due to this flexibility, our customers can benefit by receiving a tailor-made solution to meet all expectations.
Published on: 04/04/2015
DISCLAIMER: All views and opinions expressed in this column are solely of the interviewee, and they do not reflect in any way the opinion of Fibre2Fashion.com.
20230103183907.png)
