Before the commencement of ShanghaiTex 2019, CTA
conducted an interview with Thomas Höpfl, Sales Director and Clemens Kaplan,
Area Sales Manager East Asia from Mahlo GmbH + Co. KG.
Mahlo believes that one of
the strongest trends in the market is the
digitalization of the textile factory. In order to
be able to work economically in the future, the entire production chain “must
be digitized”.
Networking the machines with each other but
also with customers and business partners is becoming more and more important. The
acquisition and evaluation of process and product data plays a central role.
This data must be available to decision-makers at all times in flexible forms
of protocols, analyses, reports, etc., so that optimization potentials can be
identified and process adjustments made. This is exactly what Mahlo's products
offer its Chinese and global customers.
“Mahlo plays a central key
role here, since, for example, with our data management tool mLog system, all
data can be recorded online, regulated and made available to the producers,”
said Höpfl.
To be specific, in China,
Mahlo will increasingly concentrate on process control in the next few years. Its
main goal is to upgrade existing plants and thus optimize production processes.
To this end, Mahlo works closely with producers in
the textile, technical textiles and nonwovens sectors. “We want to give them
the opportunity to get the best out of their existing production facilities,”
said Höpfl.
Growing
market for technical textiles

In recent years, in addition
to classic woven fabrics, technical textiles are also becoming increasingly
important. Mahlo observed growth figures of the market all over the
world.
Almost every day, new applications emerge in which
technical textiles are used - from the medical sector and geotextiles to filter
technology and lightweight construction methods made of carbon and glass fibre.
According to Höpfl, Mahlo’s strength in this market
is its many years of experience in measurement and control technology. Its
quality measuring system Qualiscan QMS uses various measuring technologies for
goods inspection and can therefore be tailored to a wide range of applications.
He added that particularly with technical textiles,
certain parameters are indispensable for the desired function of the product.
These goods must be manufactured with pinpoint accuracy, for example with
regard to the coating application.
Quality requirements are even more important here
than in the case of classic textiles. The manufacture of these sophisticated
products is not possible without state-of-the-art technology.
“Since Mahlo offers exactly this advanced
technology, the technical textiles sector is a potential growth market for us.
The higher and constantly changing customer demands require a system that is
constantly evolving,” he said. “New ideas, research and development are
therefore always important factors for us. This applies not only to the
technical textiles sector, but also to all applications.”
Developing well despite global crisis
Talking about the global market development, Kaplan
pointed out that the ASEAN market is Mahlo’s fastest growing market and its
most important market outside the EU. The company continues to see great
opportunities for growth here as quality standards rise significantly.
As said, 2018 was the most successful year in the company's history. In 2019, the company is also developing well, but it
is feeling the impact of the declining
investment activity in many markets.
Kaplan said the year of 2019 presents the world
economy with a number of challenges: the imminent trade dispute between China
and the USA, Brexit, regional instabilities such as in the Middle East and
South America.
“Of course, we are also concerned about these
developments. What makes us confident, however, is an unbroken trend towards
high-quality textiles. And Mahlo products help
to achieve this goal in our most important market China as well as in other
strong markets such as Japan, Italy, Turkey and the DACH region,” Kaplan
said.
Highlights at
ShanghaiTex 2019
As introduced, Mahlo's
focus for Shanghaitex this year is on its automatic
straightening systems and process control systems for classic and technical
textiles, which are becoming increasingly important in China.
Solutions that were presented as a study at
ITMA 2019 in Barcelona can now be purchased by the customers as finished systems. These include its control room software mPilot and the data management tool mLog.