The 2nd Euratex Convention – the European exchange & meeting platform for the textile industry – took place on 4 and 5 November 2013 at Deutsche Bank (DB) in Berlin. Gesamtverband textil+mode hosted the event and geared the Convention towards a future-oriented subject: "European Textiles & Fashion 2025 - A new industry paradigm driven by innovation". The event co-organised with EURATEX allowed 130 participants from 16 countries to listen to 18 differently angled lectures providing ideas and visions for the future of the Textile and Clothing Industry.
During the opening session Mr. Peter Schwartze, President of Confederation of the German Textile and Fashion Industry said that: : “[…] when looking at 2025 it is important to know how the industrial powerhouses worldwide are going to develop. We are convinced that global megatrends are going to sustainably influence our industry and that the Textile and Clothing industry of the year 2025 will be radically different from the industry of today.
"Hence the importance for our industry to anticipate global developments and to increasingly turn towards world markets as […] international competition will secure prosperity and jobs in Europe. Most importantly […] we [should] collectively succeed to meet the challenges of the future [and for that] we need a strong Europe. A Europe, in which we think and act more European!”
In his opening remarks Mr. Alberto Paccanelli, Euratex President, stressed that “[...] We need more industry in Europe, the kind of industry that is innovative, creative, service oriented and with a global market aim; an industry capable to be competitive on a worldwide basis. Moreover, Euratex considers of paramount importance of maintaining and supporting European based textile and clothing value chains in an open world while it is of key importance to be in tune with and possibly anticipate world trends to maintain our world leadership both in fashion, interior and technical textiles areas. Hence the importance of this second Convention after Istanbul in 2012. This should provide food for thought to the audience on how we can collectively best approach our future”
The first session helped to look at the Textile and Fashion industries in 2025 from an international point of view. Presentations from representatives from China and the USA showed the expectations from the USA in the context of the incoming free trade area negotiations and unveiled the future prospect of China textile and nonwoven industries as well as the opportunities and challenges the China powerhouse will face by 2025, thus impacting the Textile and Clothing World.
This helped to make the transition to the results of a prospective study promoted by the German industry and research community on the “Future perspectives of the textile and fashion industry” which provided an exhaustive review of the global challenges expected by 2025 and how textiles can help bringing solutions: clothing will become smarter and would ease the integration of the population in a growing urbanisation process while providing good monitoring and cheap solution in the medical field to help an ageing populations.
Textiles would also provide improved interior textile and architecture solutions (filtration, climate control, etc.) that would increase the life quality in new cities while being part of the solutions that would help to face the future growth in the urbanisation and the need to remove hazard; finally textile solutions would help enhance world resource efficiency in fields like nutrition, water, climate, energy, mobility, etc..
Interestingly the “Roadmap of the Korean Technical Textiles for Future Transition of Global Textile Markets” showed how those global trends can be approached sometimes quite differently while the way in which Turkey would challenge and cope with international trends in the textile world was presented as a balancing view to this session.
Before analysing how textile trade fairs would answer by 2025 to those recognised challenges and world trends, the audience had the opportunity to listen the view from a think-thank on how Europe is maintaining its global competitiveness and how the trade policy challenges could impact positively on the future European Textile and Clothing industry competitiveness.
Two more specific sessions endorsed the fact that the future of the industry will provide special importance for the development of interpersonal issues such as interdisciplinary collaboration, knowledge-oriented networking and new cooperation in international value chains.
Those presentations made clear that this would force reinventing the knowledge networks to provide practical solutions to, for instance, fashion, home textiles, civil engineering, mobility or health domains.
All those areas were exemplified by lively presentations of how already today companies and researchers are attempting to anticipate the mega-trends by integrating new paradigms and market approaches in the fashion, home textiles and technical textiles sectors fields and already offering solutions and products that are and will soon be put on the market. Finally, the audience had also the opportunity to follow a lively presentation on how future Multichannel Commerce will impact and revolutionize the globalised textile and clothing industry, but not only.
Those sessions provided impetus to the idea that transferring today’s megatrends into action plans for individual company and strategies is of increasing importance in this globalized and highly competitive environment.
The Convention was also the opportunity for the audience to listen to the key note of Dr. Markus Kerber from the BDI - Federation of German Industry - who shared an interesting view on how structural changes can be managed at sector and national and European level in order to strengthen industry in the EU.
Among the key points he underlined the importance of liberalized markets, the need to harmonize the European taxation systems and energy strategies as well as the recognizable change in dynamics of today’s industrial sectors. A presentation of the DB Research Study on “Europe‘s re-industrialisation: The gulf between aspiration and reality” provided another well documented approach on how European policy for manufacturing industry should evolve to support its transformation in view of the 2025 challenges.
Finally the dinner speech held by Jürgen Fitschen, Co-Chair of Deutsche Bank, gave - besides suggestions for the individual look at national markets and conditions of export-oriented companies - additional impetus for the trust in the future development of the financial sector.