Market Potential
For Roller-Air Yarns (Click for more info)
Yarn is manufactured by twisting cotton and/or man-made polyester fibres together.
For more than 30 years the Schlafhorst Autocoro has been the most successful automated spinning machine. They are equipped with upwards of 240 Rotor technology fibre-twisting devices.
More than 3 million Autocoro Rotor technology fibre-twisting devices have been delivered to spinning-mill customers all over the world. The Rotor fibre-twisting device market share of the Autocoro is approximately 65%.
The original sales value of Autocoros at today's money equates to over £5 billion.
Autocoros retrofitted with Roller-Air fibre-twisting devices will enable higher-speed and fully-automated commercial spinning of soft-handle mass-market yarns that currently are the sole preserve of the slow, non-automated, and labour intensive, Ring spinning machines.
In 2008/09 these yarns will achieve a sales value of around £80 billion, which is over £200 million per day.
And they can only be manufactured by commercial fibre-twisting spinning devices.
The Roller-Air new technology is now incorporated into a refined mechanical fibre-twisting spinning device. The new technology's monopoly creating Intellectual Property is uniquely patentable but in order to keep technology poachers and legitimate competitors in the dark for as long as possible, secrecy is the name of the game. Patenting will only be done close to the industrial engineering manufacture of the Autocoro retrofitting kit.
The plan is to retrofit existing in-mill spinning machines to initially give a massive ten-fold increase in yarn production compare to Ring technology fibre-twisting spinning devices..
Thereafter, other patentable features already in the pipe-line will be introduced, along with enough of an stepped increase in yarn production; say 20 percent at a time; to commercially encourage the world's spinning mills to re-equip again, and the competition always playing catch-up. These gradual step by step increases will be up to an enormous fifty-fold increase within a decade thereafter of the device's market introduction at a ten-fold increase in Ring spun yarn production.
In comparison with existing Rotor technology fibre-twisting devices, the new Roller-Air device will cost about 30 percent more to industrially engineering manufacture. This spread over 10 years (or more) is negligible. Particularly more so when one considers (i) some 60 percent of a spinning mills' manufacturing cost of mass-market yarns is the purchase and preparation of raw cotton lint and man-made polyester fibres that are used as spinning machine feedstock; (ii) some 35 percent is spent on spinning mill floor space and operating costs; and (iii) just 5 percent being attributable to capital depreciation.
The project is now at the stage of needing to build a 4 spinning-position pre-production machine at a cost of circa £500,000 over a period of 9 months to carry out yarn, fabric and garment commercialisation trials to demonstrate to the likes of Marks and Spencer etc.
The precision engineering company which has been involved as a subcontractor from the outset is Bolton-based Velden Engineering from its factory in the 200 year old, ex Cotton Mill building. See Velden's website at www.velden.co.uk to see the firms precision engineering capability.
