Fong’s, Autefa and Monforts to strengthen company presence globally
By K. Gopalakrishnan
China is undoubtedly the global textile industry leader. But in textile machinery manufacturing, Europe continues to be the powerhouse of technology, research and innovation. European machinery manufacturers still command a premium in the global market for superior quality and technology. However, Chinese textile machinery manufacturers can boast of big numbers but haven’t been able to establish a credible global presence.
There are always exceptions to this, and CHTC is one such company which is emerging a global conglomerate in textile machinery manufacturing. With its presence across the entire spectrum of textile machinery, from spinning to garmenting, CHTC has been aggressively acquiring established global brands to strengthen its technological capabilities. The company made its intention clear with the acquisition of Fong’s and Autefa in 2011 and more recently the premium German brand Monforts through Fong’s. All these acquisitions will further strengthen CHTC’s product range, technology and, more importantly, its brand perception globally. Here is a detailed analysis of the group’s ambitious future plans.
China Hi-Tech Group Corporation (CHTC), a large-sized wholly State-owned central enterprise supervised by the Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council (SASAC), has 20 secondary subsidiaries and over 100 third-level subsidiaries, hiring more than 50,000 employees. These subsidiaries are located in over 20 Chinese provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions, as well as nearly 20 foreign countries and regions.
Among them are five listed companies, namely, Jingwei Textile Machinery Co. Ltd. listed in the Hong Kong stock market and the H.A stock market of China; CHTC KAMA Co. Ltd. listed in the B stock market of China; Baoding Swan Co. Ltd. and China Garments Co. Ltd., both listed in the A stock market of China; and Fong’s Industries Company Ltd. listed on the main board of Hong Kong.
CHTC has three business sectors, i.e., textile machinery, textile trade and commercial vehicles. Based on that, it has formed six business units – textile machinery, textile trade, new fiber materials, heavy machinery, real estate and investment. Among them, textile machinery is CHTC’s core business, with its ranking in scale among the top two in the global textile machinery field.
Currently, CHTC boasts the world’s most complete range of textile machinery, with its major products ranging from cotton spinning equipment, chemical fiber equipment, and printing & dyeing & finishing equipment to nonwoven equipment.
The CHTC mission is to “build an equipment flagship and pioneer textile development”, with a goal of “becoming an internationally competitive enterprise”. In 2009, it had mapped out a “three-step” strategy on the basis of deliberation and study. The blueprint of this strategy is to reach 30 billion RMB in sales revenue by 2011, 60 billion RMB in sales revenue by 2015, and the breakthrough of the 100 billion RMB threshold by 2020.
Judging by operation results in recent years, the total assets and total revenue of CHTC kept an average annual growth rate of 30 per cent since 2008, the average annual growth rate of total profit is 122 per cent. In 2011, CHTC reached total assets of 42 billion RMB, total sales of 33.6 billion RMB and total profit of 1.6 billion RMB, which has fulfilled the first step of its strategic goal.
With the deepening of structure adjustment and the launch of management improvement activities, the group is showing a healthy, sustainable trend of growth. The success is first reflected in the facts that CHTC has expanded its primary business of textile machinery and boosted its market competitiveness through technical and management innovation and by acquiring or merging outstanding enterprises, including Fong’s and Autefa Solutions. Secondly, the sound development of business units developed by it in recent years, including automobile and new fiber materials, has boosted its overall anti-risk capacity as a group. It is believed that CHTC will become an internationally competitive enterprise in the near future.
“Cooperation, Innovation, Excellence” is the spirit of CHTC, and innovation is the driving force for its rapid development. It has increased technological input year by year and invested 400 million yuan in textile machinery R&D last year, accounting for 4.6 percent of primary business revenues of textile machinery. In 2011, six projects of CHTC won the“Light of Textile” award for progress in science and technology from the China National Textile and Apparel Council. Altogether 152 new patents have been filed by CHTC, including 15 patents for invention.
Jingwei Textile Machinery Co. Ltd. is the key enterprise of cotton spinning business, which enjoys worldwide reputation for a wide range of single series and complete products for procedures, including blowing, carding, drawing, combing, roving, spinning, winding and twisting. With a wide variety of high-caliber new weaving equipment, such as warping, slashing and weaving equipment (air jet loom, rapier loom, water jet loom, knitting loom, warp knitting loom, etc.), it can meet diverse demands of domestic and overseas markets.
CHTC’s cotton spinning machinery is developing in the direction of short process, continuity, high efficiency, automation, high speed and full-process spinning intelligence. Also, great progress has been made in the networked monitoring and management of the spinning workshop, and the expert system. Applications of network communication, electronic, detection and precision machinery manufacturing technologies to weaving equipment have further enhanced the electromechanical integration, reliability and energy consumption of products.
CHTC’s core enterprise of chemical fiber business is CHTC Heavy Industry Co. Ltd., which is one of the three largest polyester staple equipment manufacturers and the largest viscose and sizing equipment supplier in the world. It can provide customers with complete polyester staple equipment with a maximum annual single-line production capacity of 60,000 tonnages, complete viscose staple equipment with an annual production capacity of 50,000 tonnages and complete wet-spun acrylic equipment with an annual production capacity of 15,000 tonnages, as well as equipment for high-tech fibers and green fibers, including carbon fiber, Kevlar 1313, Kevlar 1414 and high-strength and high-modulus polyethylene fiber.
It has constantly improved the technical level and operation reliability of key individual machines, achieved breakthrough in functional, differentiated and high-performance fiber equipment, and accomplished the industrialization of these products. It maintains a large share in the domestic market and has exported its products to international markets.
CHTC’s new member Fong’s Industries Company Ltd. has boosted the overall strength of the group’s printing & dyeing and finishing equipment as the core enterprise under one roof. It can provide customers with printing, dyeing and finishing equipment for various fabrics, including pure cotton, polyester cotton, chemical fiber, wool, silk and linen, and meet the technological requirements of processing medium and high-grade garment fabrics and ornaments. It has paid adequate attention to researches on new printing & dyeing technologies and processes, constantly improved the level of automation control and the capability of online detection control, and achieved breakthrough in low-pollution and energy-conserving printing & dyeing equipment, including airflow dyeing machine and heat recovery system, thus constantly raising the technical level of equipment.
CHTC has formed the core business of nonwoven equipment by combining the nonwoven equipment of newly-joined Autefa Solutions Group and original nonwoven equipment of CHTC, including spun-bonded equipment, melt-blown equipment, needling equipment and spun-laced equipment. It can provide customers with a complete line of nonwoven equipments consisting of spun-bonded, spun-laced, needling, hot-blast, thermal bonded, melt-blown and composite spinning.
The company will dedicate to cutting-edge research and development on integration of composite spinning with nonwoven processing, and, to the realization of crossover and combination of different techniques after perfecting various individual nonwoven techniques, to the formation of new-generation complete nonwoven equipment, and to further improvement of the technical level and competitiveness of nonwoven machinery, thus providing customers with turn-key solutions.
Participation in ITMA Asia
CHTC attached great importance to ITMA Asia & CITME 2012. With the support of the China Textile Machinery Association and the organizing committee of the exhibition, the group reserved Hall W1 and reached the largest-ever exhibition scale in its history, conveying the idea of “innovative and powerful, unified image and grand scale”.
Hall W1 could be described as the epitome of CHTC’s textile machinery business. With an effective exhibition area of 7,000 sq. meters, the hall brought together all textile machinery manufacturers under the CHTC roof to showcase their latest research findings in four business sectors – cotton spinning machinery, chemical fiber machinery, printing, dyeing & finishing machinery, and nonwoven machinery. Among equipments on show were machinery production lines as well as 68 units (sets) of single machines, 30 units (sets) of cotton spinning machines, 16 units (sets) of chemical fiber machines, 10 units (sets) of printing, dyeing & finishing machines, and 12 units (sets) of nonwoven machines.
In the field of cotton spinning equipment, the technical level of CHTC’s complete cotton spinning equipment and turn-key project has been boosted. Firstly, it is due to applications of new spinning technologies, including those of Jingwei integrated roving, spinning and winding system. Secondly, the technical level of individual machines has been raised considerably, a large quantity of upgraded machines, including reciprocating bale plucker, high-precision foreign fiber sorter, high-efficiency carding machine, new comber and automatic tray winder.
Lastly, through management reform and informationized reconstruction, complete cotton spinning equipment manufacturers have integrated operations of order processing, production organization, installation, commissioning and engineering services. Technical quality, operation stability and operation efficiency of complete cotton spinning equipment projects have all been improved.
Complete chemical fiber equipment remained a highlight of CHTC’s at the exhibition. Apart from polyester, acrylic and viscose production lines, the exhibition also displayed the complete high-performance carbon fiber equipment production line (model) introduced by CHTC Heavy Industry Co. Ltd. last year. The equipment will reduce China’s dependence on imported high-performance carbon fiber.
Since Fong’s Industry joined the group, CHTC gained a prominent technical advantage in complete printing, dyeing & finishing equipment. With support from CHTC, by running on the “two wheels” of technology advancements and acquisitions, Fong’s Industry will gain faster and better growth, keeping playing the leading role in the industry.
All the machines exhibited by Fong’s, including TEC multipurpose high-temperature dyeing machine, Fong’s Then Airflow dyeing machine and Fong’s Fuji Montex 6500 setting machine represented the highest level of the current dyeing & finishing industry.
Since Autefa Solutions joined the group, advantage complementation with the existing nonwoven enterprises of CHTC has been accomplished. After integrating its nonwoven machinery sector, CHTC has found prominent technical advantage in nonwoven production lines, including needling, spun-laced and composite spinning lines. The technical level of needling and spun-laced production lines as well as single machines, including comber and lapper on show, has been improved dramatically.