Digital Textile Printing Technologies - Essay Example

Product innovation and services would be the assets for competition and the key to growth in the future. International companies can only face the competition by selling know-how intensive products to the Chinese market and by focusing on the quality and technology lead. Technical textiles are likely to develop into a niche market for companies based in Europe and the US. These textiles promise good business potential, with worldwide consumption expected to touch 20.58 million tonnes by 2006 and 24.67 m.t. by 2010. In 2005, consumption of technical textiles stood at 18.69 m.t.

Technical textiles find application in several fields such as agriculture, where the worldwide consumption in 2005 stood at 15.81 lakh tonnes, in the building industry (16.48 lakh tonnes), clothing industry (12.38 lakh tonnes), the medical field (15.43 lakh tonnes) and even sports (9.89 lakh tonnes), among others. The last two decades have witnessed substantial effort in improvement of printing technology in the world. Conventional product lines have given way to new automated digital printing technology.

The rapidly growing world of digitally printed textiles is a reflection of several exclusive and different business models that create challenges, threats and opportunities to the future of the textile printing market. The challeng The challenges in digital textile printing industries include finding suitable markets and changing their paradigms, limitations of materials, testing requirements, the current pace of technology, and set individual challenges in making digital textile printing technology grow successfully in this new world.

The first challenge is to find the right market for the digital printing industry to flourish and grow. Second challenge is understanding the pros and cons and varying characteristics of the materials in the market today. Keeping up with technology improvements and changes is the only way for the potential prospects of the digital textile industry. Product InnovationProduct innovation means different things to different people. Some, for example, tend to think in terms of a product which is 'first of its kind'.

Such radical innovation is not necessarily more important than the steady, incremental improvements to existing ranges of