Textile Supply Chain will Always Need the Support of the Turkish Textile Sector
Interview: Tuğba KARADEMİR
While 2024 represented a challenging period for Santex Rimar, the company quickly adapted to the global market’s restructuring process, reinforcing its pioneering role in the industry. Over the past year, Santex Rimar developed innovative machines and solutions focused on energy efficiency and environmental sustainability to enhance the operational efficiency of its customers. The company is also accelerating the industry’s transformation with advancements in digitalization and automation.
Despite the challenging economic and geopolitical conditions, Santex Rimar continues to offer tailored solutions to enhance operational efficiency in close collaboration with its customers in Turkiye. Simone Rancan, CEO of Santex Rimar, states, “Turkiye has been – and will continue to be – a very important market. Despite the present difficulties, we believe that the textile supply chain will always need the support of the Turkish textile sector.
How was 2024 for Santex Rimar? What were the most significant technological innovations you introduced during the year?
For many of our customers around the world, it was a year of deep restructuring. The business environment was challenging and there was great uncertainty about the future because of the well-known geopolitical issues. So customers were especially focused on operational efficiency. Therefore during the year we actively proposed new options to enable customers to prioritize machines and plants targeted at reducing operating costs.
In terms of energy efficiency and environmental sustainability, what progress has Santex Rimar made with its newly-developed products?
Santex Rimar has always been a reference for the market in terms of energy consumption and sustainability. The premium quality of our projects and machines translates into lower energy consumption per kilo of material processed. This is achieved by reducing those factors with a negative impact on sustainability. Embracing sustainability also has the positive consequence of reducing both waste and energy consumption. We have also made great strides in developing software that optimizes machine performance in order to achieve these goals.
“Santex Rimar has always brought its clients the best-available solutions for digitalization.”
How has Santex Rimar been transformed in aspects such as digitalization and automation? What benefits have these innovations brought to the industry?
Digitalization and automation have been key topics in the industry for many years. And Santex Rimar has always brought its clients the best-available solutions for digitalization. This commitment has required strong investments in our own engineering, as well as cooperation with partners active in digital production technologies. We are extremely satisfied with the results achieved here. The level of automation is also increasing. We note that our clients are continuously choosing machines and plants with our more advanced automation concepts. This brings the end-user maximum consistency in output quality levels, as well as the possibility to operate processes with reduced personnel.
What are your strategies for the Turkish market? Are there any new products or solutions specifically developed for this market?
Turkiye has been – and will continue to be – a very important market. Despite the present difficulties, we believe that the textile supply chain will always need the support of the Turkish textile sector. From our side, we know that our clients in Turkiye are very professional and demanding. So our strategy for this market is to have closer cooperation with our customers to develop tailor-made solutions specific to their needs, based on listening to their valued suggestions. We think this is the key to success.
How do you integrate customer feedback into your product development processes, and what innovations have you made to improve the user experience?
Our Global Service team represents our eyes and ears in the market. We are very proud of this worldwide network, which is vital in bringing feedback from customers. These responses are discussed and analyzed internally by our engineering and sales teams. The interface with latest PLC technologies helps a lot in this process. We have achieved extremely satisfying results, for example in the application of compacting technologies, thanks to this approach, and we will continue in other areas as well.
What are Santex Rimar’s strategic goals and expectations for 2025? What can you share about new products and technological advances?
The year 2025 will still be one of uncertainty, for us and the customers. In such an environment, we need to focus on bringing short-term and effective advantages to our clients to help them through this difficult period. Our technological advances are thus mainly focused on software improvements and digitalization. These are the kind of improvements that can be implemented quickly, once developed, not only on new machines but also on existing machines and plants. In this way we achieve a double target, enhancing the new products and giving clients the chance to improve what they already have.
