Interview with Mr Bruno Ameline

UCMTF is a trade association grouping about 35 French textile machinery manufacturers. Our members are specialty manufacturers, SMEs, but among the world leaders on niche markets and specific applications. They are particularly strong in weaving preparation and nonwovens, and in specialized spinning, dyeing and finishing machinery. They export most of their production for an annual total of more than Euros 1 billion (close to US$ 1.3 billion) and employ more than 8 000. France is the 3rd exporter of textile machinery in the European Union behind Germany and Italy, the 6th worldwide, with a growing market share of 6.5%.

As a trade association and CEMATEX member, we provide marketing and logistical support to our members, in order to help them exhibit at selected shows and to enhance their marketing and sales efforts through seminars. In 2010 we are supporting French exhibitors at ITMA ASIA and we organize three seminars, in India, Syria and Turkey.

UCMTF also promotes our sector in order to attract young engineering and managerial talents.We focus our efforts towards the best universities and organize every two years a Forum to which we invite textile students from all over France. The last one took place in Mulhouse with more than 200 attendees.

We also focus on sharing information and implementing services among our members, making our network of Small and Middle size Enterprises very effective and proactive.

Last but not least, UCMTF through face to face meetings, interviews, press releases and our Web site www.ucmtf.com informs the international trade press about our initiatives.

Beginning of 2008, the economic environment was pretty good in general and, particularly for textile machinery. But, as you know, the crisis stroke mid of the year and as the industrial equipment sector is extremely cyclical, we had to face a brutal stop that no one could have expected so sudden and severe. The economic downturn was coupled with a financing crunch for investment projects and difficulties in obtaining credit insurance in some export countries.

The worst is now over and we are on the road to recovery. Asian countries like China and India have already rapidly recovered, the USA seem to emerge from the slump as Europe even if it is a bit slower here.

As the textile manufacturers operate closer to full capacity, they become progressively more confident about their future and investments start to pick up again. A positive factor is also the recent depreciation of the euro versus other major currencies, which should benefit to European exporters in the coming months. Another very important incentive to invest is the development of new products which need new production technologies.

Clearly, we see warmer prospects since the end of 2009. Spare parts business is getting back to usual levels, which means the utilization of the existing textile production facilities has improved, orders for new machines also and many new projects are under discussion. I expect at least a 10% rebound in the first semester of 2010 compared to the very low figures of 2009 and a more robust rebound end of 2010 and in 2011.

The general forecast above needs to be detailed and contrasted:

-by region: the crisis was rather short in China and other Asian countries which started to recover as early as spring 2009, the US are recovering and Europe following.

-by application sectors: technical textiles particularly the ones associated with infrastructure projects, the protection of the environment or energy savings will do better than textile for apparel and the home market.

In China, for example, on September 2008, the government announced a series of measures to encourage investment and consumption. One of the projects concerns doubling the investment in rail networks. It will need millions of square meters of geotextiles which increasingly evolve in the direction of nonwovens solutions. French machinery manufacturers are very well positioned for such investments.

India is a major target market for us, as we see the Indian economy developing rapidly and being responsive to new textile related needs; therefore the senior managers of our member companies want to meet personally our Indian customers as effectively as possible. This is why we invited the Indian textile producers to two seminars. The attendances exceeded expectations with approximately 150 attendees in Mumbai and close to 200 in Ludhiana.

The objectives set for the seminars were:

- to present in what ways the French technology can enable the Indian textile producers to enhance their position by providing sustainable competitive advantages in the following markets: Recycling - Nonwovens - Technical textiles - Yarn preparation and yarn treatment - Modern weaving - Knitting - Dyeing and Finishing - Air conditioning of textile plants.

- to get feed back from our customers. Evelyne Cholet, our Secretary General, has been very active in the preparation of the seminars as she knows from experience that very close relationships with the customers is essential.

Generally speaking, our companies are well positioned for the future because they invest a lot in R&D. During the crisis, while carefully managing our cash reserves, we have continued to invest in R&D in close relationship or partnership with our clients all over the world.

We also work very closely with machinery manufacturers offering complementary technologies to offer our customers a “single point of purchase”. More and more, our clients want to get a complete solution, shop for complete lines or even complete plants. We have understood this trend for several years and adapted our offer. For example, in the fast growing filtration market, the products have to fit so many specific usages, in so many industries, that the processes to produce the fabrics or the nonwovens have to be adapted to each specific application.

As already mentioned, most French machinery manufacturers are specialty manufacturers, SMEs but world leaders or among the world leaders on niche markets and specific applications. These markets are complex, limited in size, but with high value added. They are more difficult to be addressed by the new and large machinery manufacturers from China or India as they are not big enough and highly fragmented.

While offering high tech machinery for high tech specialty markets, I strongly believe we have to customize our machines and offer tailor made solutions to our customers. We are not equipped to compete on mass production applications, like short fibers or filament spinning, for which price is the main factor. For these segments, production will continue to be transferred to low costs countries.

Our most important added value lies in working closely with our customers, in producing made to orders machines on short delivery time, in being flexible, and being prepared to face large swings in volume. This also means we must balance the traditional vertical integration organization of our production facilities with a more flexible approach. Most of us may need to outsource the production of most of our components, to build a network of state of the art, cost effective and flexible suppliers, to design machines in modules in order to propose a large and diversified product offer without over-complexifying production. We also have to actively participate in the decision process of our customers in order to propose them solutions for their own production strategies and become more and more process partners and not only suppliers of off-shelf machinery.

I would like to extend your question and talk about “durable economy mission”: this includes social targets but stretches to community-related concerns as well as environmental and energy- related issues. I must first remind you that our companies are private, often family-owned. If they have to make a profit to invest for the future, the owners and the managers who are often the same, can focus on the long term, often with an inter-generational perspective.

This is why we are very sensitive to our employees’ well-being and to the preservation of communities where we are located. Because we are serving niche specialized markets with customized products, away from mass production, we have mostly chosen not to delocalize our engineering and manufacturing in low cost countries. Our member companies still employ most of their staff in France and contribute to maintain our know-how and jobs in our country.

We are also more and more active on energy savings and the preservation of our environment. For example, one of our companies, with close to 100 years of experience in fiber processing equipment, has developed new processes to turn textile wastes or otherwise discarded raw materials into alternative industrial products. Used clothes can be turned into nonwoven products which are used as sound and thermal barriers in the automotive, furniture and building industries. Selected products such as cotton yarns and fabrics can also be fiberized and spun into yarns again, thus saving growing more cotton, a major user of water and pesticides. Besides bringing revenues to a charity organization (which collect the used clothes), this allows reducing consumption of raw materials and of heating or cooling energy for buildings.

About energy savings, we have found very different ways to offer energy saving machines: fine tuning the machine to fit exactly the energy profile of the production process, finding new low energy processes for individual machines and optimizing the energy consumption of a whole production line, adapting the machines to the market requirements and designing new technologies to recycle textile products. These approaches are not exclusive one from the other, they can be combined. In many examples, the energy savings are in the 30-40 % range, same or even more for the water consumption in dyeing and finishing.

Textile machinery hence contributes to a better life for mankind and to a durable economy.