Dilmenler Produces Printing Machines with the Motto: “Succeeding the Impossible”
İsmail Şengüler, Dilmenler General Manager
Dilmenler Makine, which has expanded its production facility in Çorlu for the last 2 years and significantly increased its machinery production capacity with its investments, is starting a new factory investment this year as well. The company, which produces all kinds of machines in dyeing and finishing technologies, has rolled up its sleeves to produce printing machines this time. We listened to all the ongoing and planned innovations and developments of the company, which continues at full speed with the motto ‘‘succeeding what is not possible and what no one can do, and breaking new ground’’ from General Manager İsmail Şengüler.
How was the year 2021 for Dilmenler, can you please elaborate?
Due to the effects of the pandemic, the textile industry in 2021 showed a serious rise in Turkey as well as in the world. Companies made investments to protect and improve what they had. New companies were established. These developments, in turn, increased the investments in machinery. In this period, Turkey started to increase its share in the world textile market. Textile orders shifted to Turkey for reasons such as Turkey’s proximity to Europe and the world’s hesitation from doing trade with China due to the pandemic. This has increased both our capacities and our hopes.
In line with these developments, we have started to experience pressures to produce and deliver our machines until the promised date since June 2021. Because as the machine demands increased as a result of investments, our production numbers also increased, and our delivery times were shortened. Keeping up with these busy orders, we tried to determine what we need to do to produce more machines and deliver them on time, that is, to produce more and faster machines in our factory, and try to make them more efficient.
What kind of investments did you make in order to achieve this?
As Dilmenler, we decided to invest in new buildings and technology in 2019 in order to enlarge our existing facility and increase our capacity. Accordingly, we built 2 new buildings with a closed area of 20 thousand m2. We also bought new laser cutting machines and CNC benches to utilize in production. Even though the pandemic period started in the middle of these investments, we continued our construction and machinery purchases… Fortunately, we continued and made these investments. Otherwise, we would not have the current production quality and capacity.
How much has your current capacity increased?
Compared to our previous production figures, we can now produce 50-60% more machines per month. This is due to both the increase in our physical space and the improved performance of our new machines.
Have you been investing for the last 2 years to reach your current high performance?
What we call investment is a step-by-step process. First, you build the appropriate building and settle in. You need to train new staff to work here and teach them the job they will attend to. Then the machines and benches you will use arrive and are installed. You run them, you train the personnel to work in them. We have been dealing with these throughout 2020.
In 2021, it was about the orders received in 2020 and the manufacture of new orders. In 2021, we produced 70% more dyeing and stenter machines compared to 2020. In 2022, it seems that there will be a further increase and improvement.
Are these investments reflected in your manufacturing costs and sales prices?
No, these are investments made with our own resources. However, due to the rapid fluctuations in the dollar exchange rate in the recent period, serious problems have arisen in raw material inputs. This caused changes in cost and profit rates.
For example, you receive an order today, you say that you will send the machine 6 months later. In these 6 months, the price of the raw material increases due to the exchange rate, and finding the raw material or other auxiliary materials can become a problem. There is a problem with the materials we buy from other places. The importer companies from which we buy materials are stalling to protect themselves in order not to be adversely affected by the fluctuations in the exchange rates and they do not complete the sales. For this reason, the date we have to deliver the machines may be extended. Most importantly, it caused a decrease in the profits of the machines as our cost increased on the date we made the sale agreement.
Today, in order to protect ourselves from these problems, we need to increase our prices compared to 1 year or 6 months ago. “Let’s try to reflect the raw material price increases to our prices and try to catch up with our previous profit rates.” When we say that, the prices formed are not at a very acceptable level by our customers. The problem of raw material supply and currency fluctuations affected us negatively, as it did all sectors. We are trying to persuade our customers to accept the increases in our prices.
How do you evaluate this increase in demand for Turkish machinery?
World countries, especially Europe, do not prefer to buy products or machinery from the Far East and China at the moment. Especially Europe prefers Turkey because of its proximity. Our already full orders have been filled even more with the increase in machine orders from abroad. As our companies that desire to increase their production capacities and manufacture more for the domestic market also invest, an increase in machine orders have been recorded in the domestic market as well.
The increase in production is not limited to Turkey. There is also an increase in other textile-producing countries. This happened because China was seen as the world’s workshop. The part of the production there that shifts to other countries cause a great increase in the capacity of those countries. For example, the world’s first country in knitted fabric was China, and the second country was Bangladesh. Today, a small decrease in China’s knitted fabric production has had a major impact on Bangladesh’s production. As a result, manufacturers in Bangladesh had to invest to increase capacity. The same situation was seen in other textile-producing countries such as Egypt, Uzbekistan, India, Pakistan, and Indonesia.
Since our customers in these countries have made important machinery purchases, we exported large quantities of machinery and we are still receiving new orders and continuing their production.
Will your investments continue in 2022?
The expansion investments of our existing production facility in Çorlu are about to be completed, and we plan to complete it this year. In addition, we are establishing a new factory in Selimpaşa. In that factory, we will produce our rotary printing, steaming, and other technological products, that is, only our printing machines.
What is the latest situation in your printing machines today?
The production of the 1st machine produced by our MBK company is finished and is working in our Megam dye house. Mechanically everything is fine, 90-95% of the work is done. Only software adjustments and fine-tunings continue. We will manufacture every part of this machine at our new location. 2022 will be a year when both its production becomes standard and this unit will become operational in several companies. We want to follow our printing machine in a different process with the MBK brand. Our partner in Austria will also be a direct partner of MBK here. Dilmenler will provide the necessary infrastructure and support from outside. It will also put Megam Dye house at MBK’s service for the R&D of the machines.
Do you plan to produce a digital printing machine in the next stage?
Rotary printing is a technique that will exist for many years to come. After we gain momentum in the rotary printing machine and become a world brand, we can start digital machine work.
There are 5 types of machines used in the printing facility: printing, open width washing, ram, steaming, and sanforizing. We can produce all the machines in this line except the printing machine. Because these machines are also used in normal paint shops. We want to close this circle by adding the printing machine to our product range.
When we put the printing machine on the market, we will be a manufacturer that can meet all the needs of our customers who want to establish a dye house in this regard. There is no printing machine production in Turkey at the moment, we are doing it for the first time as we did in many machines in the past.
As Dilmenler, we are achieving this development by combining our knowledge and experience in machine production with the technical experience of our Austrian partner in printing.
What developments happened at Megam Dye house during this period?
We had a printing department in our Megam Dye house. Now we are splitting the printing dye house and the jet dye house into 2 separate units. Thus, dye technologies and printing technologies will be in separate sections and their development will continue without affecting each other. It will be very productive for us, especially in terms of R&D. Since we can see the results of everything we run and produce at Megam, it provides important advantages for us to constantly do better and develop it further.
Have there been any innovations in your dyeing and finishing machines?
We strive to improve the currently available rather than radical changes to our dyeing and finishing machines. Less electricity, less water, less energy, etc. We are trying to do whatever we can do for them. For this, we make minor mechanical updates such as improvements in diameters, pipes, pumps, motors. In order for the work to be more effective and better, Megam Dye house is constantly trying. Since the fabrics of the customers are used, the work here is more meticulous and R&D progresses more naturally. That’s why we offer the top version of our machines, where the parts that would cause problems and troubles were experienced and solved before the delivery.
What can you say about the differences and features of Dilmenler machinery?
Dilmenler is one of the first companies to start producing machinery in Turkey. That’s why we dealt with issues such as “what is being done in the world, what kind of solutions are needed, what users want” when we first started production, and therefore, our motto emerged as ‘‘succeeding what is not possible and what no one can do, and breaking new ground.’’ In addition, we have been one of the ‘schools’ in the sector for 30 years. Employees here established their own places and started to produce new machines.
At the point we have reached today, our competitors are generally European brands since our priority is to produce solutions for the customer. Because our customers want machines of equal or even better quality than European machines. We are constantly improving ourselves to meet these demands, and we are trying to do better than what we did best. So we compete with ourselves.
Which of your machines and innovations will we see at the ITM 2022 Exhibition?
We are attending ITM 2022 with 2 different stands in 2 halls. We will present the MDK printing machine for the first time at booth number 605A in the Printing/Digital Printing hall. As Dilmenler Machinery, we will be at stand 1206 in the Dyeing and Finishing hall. Here we will focus on continuous machines. Because we plan to demonstrate to the whole world that we are an important player in this field and that we have gone far beyond in our product range than the standard machines such as dyeing machines.
