At Mayer & Cie. (MCT), the Albstadt-based knitting machine manufacturer, the order books are well filled until the end of the year. Its order entry in mid-Q2 2016 is the highest for around 30 years. By the year-end, the company, with a payroll of about 340 employees, will probably have manufactured about 1,500 machines, almost all of them for international customers. By far the largest number will be shipped to China, followed by orders for India and Turkey.
“Looking at our order entry since January 1, 2016, the current level is one that we last reached in the boom years at the end of the 1990s,” says Wolfgang Müller, Sales Director at Mayer & Cie. At the turn of the millennium the knitting machine manufacture was shipping around 2,000 machines a year. By the end of this year, 1,500 machines are likely to have left the Mayer works – around 200 more than in 2015, which was already a highly successful year for the company when it sold around 1,300 machines, and the Mayer Group sales totalled about EUR 100 million.
To account for the outstanding demand situation at Mayer & Cie. Müller looks first at last year’s ITMA. “There is,” he says, “a definite trend toward high quality machines. It was already apparent at the 2015 international textile machinery fair in Milan and it runs across the entire market – from Bangladesh to the United States. And the high quality segment, such as Double Jersey or Jacquard machines, has always been our strong point.”
In addition to MCT’s tried and tested quality a number of other factors have brought customers back to the long-established Albstadt company in large numbers. One important factor is the trend toward sustainability. There is more and more local production to local standards and requirements. In procurement too the trend is toward locality, which eliminates long transport routes and gives purchasers flexibility. Time to market, MCT Sales Director Müller says, is the keyword.
The fashion industry is enormously fast-paced, with fresh goods being supplied to the leading fashion chains in some cases every other week. This means that although amounts to be produced are increasing, batch sizes are growing steadily smaller. That requires fast response times for, say, follow-up orders that are more or less impossible to meet over long distances.
In short, “along with the increasing importance of quality more is being produced in the traditional textile markets, which is where Mayer & Cie. is very well established,” Müller adds.
Markets and machines
When Wolfgang Müller refers to traditional nearby textile markets he mainly means Turkey, from where Mayer & Cie. has already received orders for 76 machines this year. Most of them are for high quality Jacquard and Double Jersey machines. More distant regions with a long textile industry tradition, especially Central and South America, have also been placing more orders. Rising demand in, say, Mexico, Argentina and Brazil is also due to economic circumstances, including exchange rate changes.
But the front-runner for demand is and remains China, which accounts for 154 of the orders received so far this year in Albstadt-Tailfingen. Says Wolfgang Müller: “That is remarkable inasmuch as labour costs have risen significantly there. Ready-made goods in China are on the decline once more, but fabric manufacture is a different story.”
Fabric manufacturing is booming in India too, which accounts for 94 of this year’s orders, making India the second most important sales market for Mayer & Cie.
The machines of choice at Mayer & Cie., which sells its machines via around 70 representatives worldwide, are summarised by Wolfgang Müller as a Top Three, with the D4 2.2 II and the S4 3.2 II sharing the first place. The former is a machine for Double Jersey, Rib and Interlock fabrics, while the latter is a flexible and productive Single Jersey machine.
Over 110 of each have been ordered so far this year. The runner-up with 76 orders received is the Relanit 3.2 II, a Relanit series machine. For decades Relanit machines have been a flagship product of the company. The Inovit QC, another Rib and Interlock machine, ranks third among MCT’s best-sellers.