AC-Automation, a supplier for automated solutions to the textile industry, mainly finds business in India and China with slightly different trends. While Chinese clients mainly ask for fully-automatic solutions, Indian clients asking for semi-automatic solutions, according to a top company official.
"We have delivered systems worldwide over the last 25 years. In the past five years, the main business was done in India and China. Although the Chinese man-made fibre market is significantly larger than India's, the order volume was about equal in both the countries for our company," Rolf Gaenz, managing director of AC-Automation.
AC-Automation already has teams working in India and China, and it will continue to enlarge them. The company is evaluating whether to manufacture parts on-site in India at the moment, he informed. In China, they are already doing so, and they are having good experiences.
AC-Automation, being a provider of entire solutions rather than a single product for automation, distinguishes between the trends in two main parts, as per Gaenz. In China, it is fully-automatic installations with bobbin warehouses including doffing, transport to storage, and automatic packing from there. In India, it is semi-automatic solutions including doffing onto creel carts and packing from there.
"The trend we clearly see is that customers building new plants are requesting for fully-automatic operation from the beginning to save cost on manual labour," Rolf explains.
"This is a definite change compared to the past years where the focus had been on partial automation of already existing plants," he adds.
