Mesdan Prepares for 2025 by Increasing Investments in Turkiye
Interview: Tuğba Karademir
Mesdan aims to increase its investments in the Turkish market by overcoming the challenges of 2024 with innovation and local service strategies. It plans to reinforce its strong position in the sector with new technologies and R&D projects.
2024 was a challenging year for the textile industry with the economic contraction in the global market and geopolitical tensions. However, Mesdan successfully navigated this period with its innovative solutions and strong R&D infrastructure. The company aims to maximize customer satisfaction by developing local service centers especially in the Turkish market and plans to take strategic steps focused on digitalization and sustainability for 2025. Reinforcing its innovative position in the sector with advanced technologies such as the analysis of cotton strength and recycling projects, Mesdan is strengthening its future growth targets both in Turkiye and globally. “We want to develop the Vandewiele-Savio-Mesdan local service center to better serve our Turkish customers,” said Claudio Bertolotti, Mesdan Sales Manager, in an interview for Textile Machinery Industry Italy.
“As Mesdan, we were able to expand our production range and customer base in 2024.”
The year 2024 has been a year in which a decline was observed across the global market. How did you cope with the market contraction? How was the year 2024 for your company? Could you evaluate it in terms of your production volume, orders, and export markets?
Indeed 2024 has been a difficult year for the traditional textile business; for Mesdan the decline was minimum thanks to the differentiation of our production range and our customers. In particular the Mesdan-Lab division is also dedicated to customers not directly following the general textile industry trend, like all the educational and R&D sector, the third party labs and the public organizations generally speaking.
Could you provide us with more information about your new innovations?
The business decline in 2024 was limited, mainly thanks to the latest innovations in the lab division, like CONTEST-S for the analysis of the cotton stckiness or the miniature recycling and spinning line, both completely designed internally in the Mesdan HQ to accomplish the actual market needs. We believe that the miniature shredding machine still has a great potential, thanks to the increasing need of textile reclycling R&D applications.
Could you give us more detailed information about your electronic splicer projects?
Electronic splicer is still one of the main focus of our R&D department; on-field studies and cost reduction researches are very promising but still on going. Customers can immediately appreciate the versatility and the easy settings features of the new equipment but in the long run will also realize the lower maintenance needs.
“We want to improve the Vandewiele-Savio-Mesdan local service centre, to better serve all our Turkish customers.”
It is clear that Turkiye plays a critical role in the textile sector. Do you plan to make more investments in Turkiye in 2025? What are Mesdan’s primary goals and strategic plans for the Turkish market?
Since started only in mid 2024, we want to improve the Vandewiele-Savio-Mesdan local service centre, to better serve all our Turkish customers. Many interventions were already performed by our Turkish team, granting faster reactions and easier communications in the local language. Another objective for 2025 is to invest more in the all the marketing and promotion activities, with particular focus to the digital and multimedia tools: a new web site is ready to be published, new commercial and technical tutorial videos will be produced, social media marketing will be improved, in order to strengthen the reputation of Mesdan as a solid and reliable partners of innovations for the textil industry also in Turkiye.
Meeting your customers’ environmental sustainability demands is an important criterion in the development of new products. In this context, how do you foresee the technologies developed by Mesdan contributing to energy efficiency, water conservation, and waste minimization?
Luckily the Mesdan equipment doesn’t have a great impact in the energy or water consumption and does not produce much waste, being mainly small mechanical/pneumatic components or laboratory equipment, and not huge production machines. Generally speaking, for the industral and consumer textile waste sustainability subject, the miniature shredding machine is a useful tool for the industry and all the operators who want to study and predict the recycling possibilities of their waste and consequently revise their production processes and purchasing materials towards a more circular textile world.
How have you observed geopolitical tensions affecting global trade and production strategies? As Mesdan, how do you adapt to the changing dynamics of global trade?
Although the territories directly involved in the military turmoil are of lesser importance to our business, geopolitical tensions have been felt on a large scale, creating feelings of pessimism globally and therefore reducing investments. In the Vandewiele Group works have been done towards creating more local supply chains, or creating more independent subsidiaries in the manufacturing side, to serve the local market and suffer less from the international tensions.
“There are still many R&D projects we are working on.”
What are Mesdan’s overall strategic goals for 2025? Especially focusing on new technologies and R&D investments, in which areas do you plan to advance your company further?
There are still many R&D projects we are working on; some will be completed during 2025 but many are already on the desks of our engineers, since we are well aware that we can’t stop innovating. Electronic splicer and the revision of many well-known existing lab equipment, with the aim to improve their digitalization and communication features, are in the pipeline.