Welcome to an exclusive interview with Mrs. Verena Ruckh, the Head of Marketing Department at Brückner Textile Technologies GmbH & Co. KG, Germany. In this interview, we delve into the significant contributions of German companies and organizations to the textile industries in the Middle East and Africa, as well as explore the potential for growth within these regions’ textile sectors.
Mrs. Ruckh provides valuable insights into Brückner Textiles’ role in supporting the development of these markets, along with the solutions and recommendations they offer to address key challenges in the industry.
In what ways do German companies and organizations contribute to the advancement of the textile industries in the Middle East and Africa, and what is your assessment of the potential for growth within these regions’ textile sectors?
There is a lot of potential and know-how on the African continent. These markets offer opportunities for the textile industry that just need to be exploited. In my view, it is important to have competent local contacts or representatives who know their business partners and their mentality inside out.
As a leading European textile machinery company, we can thus support the local population in building something up or developing further and investing in new business areas. Africa has always been an important market for us. The classic textile countries are among others Egypt, South Africa, Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria.
We currently even have projects in Benin and Togo. The support of our federal government and secure financing are very important for such projects.
The Middle Eastern market have been and continue to be a really important market for us. This applies not only to classic textile production, but above all to the carpet industry.
Many of our largest carpet customers produce in Türkiye and the surrounding countries. Discussions with customers at the last ITMA in Milan and other trade fairs in 2023 showed very positive signals for further investment in these markets.
What solutions and recommendations does Brückner Textiles provide?
Like our customers, we have long been concerned with the issues of reducing energy costs, emissions, and the consumption of resources. In our opinion, there are various solutions for this: for example, we offer our customers new heating options for our drying systems.
On the one hand, there is the option of combining heating systems such as gas, oil, steam or electricity. On the other hand, we offer new burners that can also be operated with hydrogen in the future. These combination options allow textile producers maximum flexibility in their choice of energy source.
Another development is our solutions for purely electric heating of industrial ovens using heat pumps. These new heating methods offer decisive advantages: electricity or green hydrogen reduces dependence on fossil fuels and help textile producers to minimize their carbon footprint.
Further potential savings result from the use of our new generation of heat recovery and exhaust air purification systems. Both types of these systems can also be retrofitted to older systems from different manufacturers at any time.
Our digital products and services offer customers further decisive advantages and potential savings. On request, our new machines can be equipped with intelligent assistance systems that allow customers to find the optimum machine setting for every process.
One particular innovation in this context is the new ExperTex simulation tool. With the help of artificial intelligence, the desired production process is simulated on the computer and different scenarios can be compared with each other: energy consumption, throughput times, production costs.
This allows orders to be calculated precisely in advance, opens up productivity gains and thus offers the customer significant added value.
