Neeraj Sharma
General Manager - Sales Orange O Tec
Digital textile printers will have added advantage of linear cost
Headquartered in Surat, Gujarat, Orange O supplies digital
textile printers to Indian textile industry. Neeraj Sharma, General Manager -
Sales, Orange O Tec, spoke to Fibre2Fashion on the cascading effect of COVID-19
crisis on the machinery industry and how the company plans to help its
customers restart production.
The current COVID-19 crisis has brought entire textiles-apparel production, supply chain, and retail sales to a grinding halt. How do you see this impacting textile machinery manufacturers and suppliers? How is your supply chain being hit? Are you facing cancellation of orders?
As per the Clothing Manufacturing Association of India (CMAI), the garment sector is going to shrink by 40 per cent in 2020. As a cascading effect, the demand for machinery would be least. But the silver lining is – digital textile printers will have added advantage of linear cost independent of run length of fabric in comparison to traditional fabric print systems which require minimum run length to make operational feasibility. Also, since labour shortage would be a factor to begin with and as digital textile printing is not so dependent on labour, this could in turn help the producers to keep up the lead time for order execution.
Post lockdown, what are the problems you foresee and how do you plan to help your clients with respect to after-sales service and spare parts?
Once we enter the post lockdown phase, the main challenge for any operation would be to kick start the machinery with minimum restart costs. As machinery loses certain spares while not in regular motion, so the challenge would be to meet this demand. We at Orange O Tec have been known for our prompt service/spares availability to all our customers for the last 10 years of operation. So, we have kept a good inventory of spares and with a team of 25 dedicated engineers on the field, we can surely help our customers start production.
What do you think the government can do to further ease pain of textile machinery manufacturing companies? Any thoughts on rallying together as a key niche of the value chain to arrive at some workable plan to get through these difficult times?
Financial breather from banks for minimum 6 months to 1 year would be a welcome move as we are majorly supporting the digital textile printing industry which is a futuristic technology and requires a lot of capital investment from our end, both in consumables and technical staff. As our customers would be expecting even greater support from us post lockdown, so we urge the government to look into the matter most diligently. (PC)
Published on: 30/04/2020
DISCLAIMER: All views and opinions expressed in this column are solely of the interviewee, and they do not reflect in any way the opinion of Fibre2Fashion.com.
