Eastern Engineering Company, a pioneer within the textile industry established more than 60 years ago, is known for introducing new product lines for the textile machinery industry. With its eye on enterprise, the company has lately been keen on identifying segments in the textile industry where mills have an opportunity to widen and deepen their presence as a new India seeks to take global leadership in multiple segments.
Eastern Engineering has the unique capability of “identifying niche segments, expanding markets for those particular segments and then growing beyond them,” says Shilpa Anand, of the company. A customer essentially requires reliability from the company he/she is purchasing from and that is what gives the company an edge. The past year has seen the group roll out product lines in three distinct segments:
Fabric formation: Dilmenler Textile Machinery Co. of Turkey specializes in machinery for all kinds of textile fabric wet processing – scouring, bleaching, mercerizing, dyeing and all types of fabric finishing, washing and drying range. Dilmenler, with a significant presence in India, is marked by consistently superior output generation due to the high level of automation incorporated in the machines.
Non-Wovens and Technical Textiles are the next-gen products. The worldwide nonwoven industry has grown steadily at about 7.5% per annum in tonnage in the last decade. A significant portion of worldwide nonwoven expansion is due to the rising demand for these materials in the emerging economies. India and China are the key players contributing to this growth. India’s nonwoven market is growing at a rate of 8-10% with prospects of touching 12-15%.
The Indian nonwovens industry is competent to expand but limited in capacity with old technology and second-hand machines. To have sustainable growth in view of the rising demand for quality products, India needs to invest in latest technology machines, and hence Eastern has introduced Graute, the German manufacturer of machines for the non-woven industry, for more than 20 years, to the market. The company provides complete solutions for non-woven web formation right from fibre opening; blending, high-speed carding, air lay production lines and web forming along with the recycling line. It has also been designing machines for individual applications.
Its sustained efforts to educate and enhance industry-wide knowledge on the importance of fibre bleaching and dyeing have yielded good results for Eastern with a spate of orders. There is value addition potential for comber noil to India’s mills with huge combed cotton yarn production by converting the comber noil into surgical cotton.
The production line offered is from the French company Callebaut de Blicquy (CDB) of the well-known Rousselet–Robatel Group for manufacturing centrifuge for various industries. CDB’s machines enable clients to process fibre and yarn with low liquor ratio and lower utilization of water and power ensuring high profitability. The company produces a diverse range of dyeing machinery which ranges from laboratory machinery to dryers and presses.
As the textile industry has overcome the challenges and structural changes brought in by GST, it has resulted in a number of companies looking to build upon the benefits of the new system with capital formation getting priority.
Asked about the future vision of the company, Shilpa Anand stated: “We foresee expansion of the textile industry into newer geographies and expect investments in sectors that have been freed from policy constraints.”
Eastern is going beyond supply of machinery and provides its customers complete solutions as in the case of surgical cotton where the company has put together a modular line that enables mills to start with raw cotton and end with retail use surgical cotton products such as wet wipes, etc. Such complete solutions, being modular in nature, allow companies to plan their investments efficiently and allow for optimum value addition.
One of the cornerstones of business longevity is making a conscious effort to give back to the society that allows a business or a corporate to grow and prosper. This being ingrained in the Eastern Group has seen them partner with companies with the same philosophy and has manifested itself in the presentation of the OPTILAB machine to DKTE Society’s Textile and Engineering Institute, Ichalkaranji, by Callebaut de Blicquy at the recently concluded GTTES organised in Mumbai.
For the Indian textile industry to grow, it is imperative that educational institutions serving the industry have at their disposal the latest equipment for both teaching and research. This helps students keep pace with advancements in technology while making them employable – twin deficits that have plagued the industry when it comes to human resources.
The OPTILAB machine will help students learn how to optimize the dyeing process by conducting spectral analyses of spent liquor samples while researching new standards on how to achieve efficient dyeing with optimal use of dyes and chemicals. With the OPTILAB also having been supplied to the industry, Textile Graduate students get a head-start in working in such mills.