Big & small textile investors line up at Vibrant Gujarat Summit

20 Jan '11

7 min read

The textile industry in Gujarat attracted investments from the big and the small at the Vibrant Gujarat Summit held in Gandhinagar – Gujarat. From textile biggies like SKumars Nationwide and Nagreeka Exports to even small investors like cotton ginners who aspire to climb up the cotton value chain, by investing in small spinning units.

The Gujarat textile sector attracted investments amounting to around Rs 252 billion. In all 139 MoUs were inked at the 2011 summit. All this in turn is expected to create employment opportunities for around 140,448 people. The major portions of the investments were made in the spinning sector, followed by technical textiles and rest was accounted for by textile parks, fabric processing and apparel sector.

Fibre2fashion spoke exclusively to a few senior honchos from the textile and cotton ginning sector who had signed MoUs at the Vibrant Gujarat Summit. Among them was Mr Sunil Patwari, Managing Director – Nagreeka Exports. Nagreeka is one of the big ticket textile investors at the summit which is investing in excess of Rs 10 billion. Informing about its investments, Mr Patwari said, “We are setting up a 300,000 spindles spinning plant in North Gujarat at an investment of about Rs 12 billion and we are in the process of identifying and acquiring the land for the project”.

Giving details to fibre2fashion, Mr Anupam Dikshit – COO (Projects) at S Kumars Nationwide Ltd. said, “We are setting up a spinning and weaving plant to produce cotton, poly-viscose at Jhagadia near Bharuch, where we already have a cotton weaving plant at the same location in which we have invested around Rs 5 billion. The new investment envisaged is between Rs 4.5-5.0 billion and the plant will be up and running by end of 2011”.

Next we spoke to Mr Narendra Agarwal, Director of Mumbai based RBA Textiles Pvt Ltd. RBA Textiles operates a 56,000 spindles spinning unit in Andhra Pradesh and is also a manufacturer and exporter of garments. He said, “We are planning to set up a 200,000 spindle spinning mill in two phases at an investment of around Rs 5.5 billion. The location is yet to be finalized but we hope to start in the next 2-3 years”. Speaking about the summit he said that he was grateful to the Government of Gujarat to enable all to gather on a common platform and provide investment opportunities without any hassles.

It is the dream of every cotton ginner to venture in to spinning of yarn to add value to the cotton that he gins. One of them is Jitendrabhai Patel of Patidar Industries Pvt Ltd from Babra in Amreli District of Gujarat. Mr Patel is the proud owner of three ginning plants. Updating fibre2fashion on his plans he revealed, “I am setting up a 12,000 spindles plant in Babra to produce cotton yarn. We have a big and ready yarn market in and around Ahmedabad, so we do not foresee any marketing challenges”.

Another very enterprising entrepreneur fibre2fashion spoke to was the Ahmedabad based, Mr Hemant Goenka – Director, GIT Textiles Manufacturing Ltd. Mr Goenka signed the MoU to set up his weaving plant in the fourth edition of the Vibrant Gujarat Summit in 2009 and is now back with plans for backward integration at this years summit. Giving details he said, “We are doubling our weaving capacity and also going in to backward integration and setting up warping and sizing plants, other than which we have a couple of plans on the drawing board”.

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