Quality auto textile products gain more ground

With the increasing requirements of people for riding a car, the unique advantages of textiles in automotive interior trim, sound insulation and noise reduction are gradually emerging. From cockpit filter, seat cover, trunk inside lining, deadening to carpet, nonwoven fabrics is playing a more and more important role in automobile market.

In terms of the function, textile has the such characteristics as heat insulation, sound-absorbing, de-slick, high intensity, stable dimension, strong color fastness, good wearing resistance, inflaming retardance, water uptake, ageing resistance and static proof; and in terms of the decoration, besides such performances as beauty, comfort, ventilation and antifouling, it is also a kind of economical and practical material. For an automobile, about 25 kg textiles may be used for more than eighty parts. With the rapid development of automobile industry, automobile textiles industry gets huge development space.

It is known that the demand of automotive textiles in domestic market is about 62.5 million square meters annually, however, only about 50 percent of them can be met by domestic production capacity; the demand of automobile carpet is 12 million square meters annually, but only about 10 percent of them can be provided at home. Therefore, there are automotive textiles valued about $4 billion needing to be imported every year.
 
The automobile industry in China has witnessed a rapid development, but compared with the foreign counterpart, there is a big disparity in automobile textile industry. Thanks to the particularity of automobile decoration materials, auto decoration material manufacturers are required to have advantages in technologies, equipments and scale, as well as close cooperation with auto part & fitting manufacturers and automobile manufacturers to design, research and develop together in order to produce products of meeting the market demand.

Currently, most of China's automotive textile enterprises are transformed from factories that produce industrial cloth, composite materials and coating materials, thus they are lack in brand marketing experience. Meanwhile, there are lacks of whole set of production equipments as well as professional factories or equipments for the pre-processing and post-processing of automotive fabrics, therefore, the quality of final products are difficult to be ensured. In addition, there is a lack of professional staff, which results in a universal weakness in the capability of independent development. Generally, compared with international level, a certain disparity still exists because of the shortage of leading enterprises in the sector of automobile textiles, as well as self-owned brands.