May 6, 2003

A trade article by Cotton Communications
CSD's Web on Wednesday
NICHE market...Mr Macdonald

Q: Andrew as far as your role in the International Textile Manufacturers Federation (ITMF) what are the bigger changes in fibre parameters that spinners are looking for in the world these days, what message can you give to our Australian growers about the fibre parameters that are going to be of importance to our end users?

A: I think that first of all you have to just remember that all cotton theoretically can be spun, it is irrespective of the condition. But if we want to get in to the premium market then we have to have premium parameters, and I think that is why the Australian market has to get into the niche market and has to concentrate on getting into that specific market in order to get the premiums which are deserved.

Those premiums will be, as the qualities improve, the intrinsic values that we are talking about, we are much more concerned about today; strength, micronaire, length, length uniformity, these factors of course we’ve talked about we will talk about neps, stickiness and so forth, but we are not so much today interested, concerned, in the grade, we are much more concerned about those intrinsic values and if Australian cotton can over time, a short space in time we hope, then this is going to be the greatest defence against synthetics who are of course now our partners and therefore offering competition to ourselves and also to match the growth of the industry in terms of technology, machines are now going much faster, we can use bidding frames, use new ideas, new concepts and all those machines to try and reduce costs are working faster and faster and also to increase the quality, so there is a tremendous market, a niche market there, a market which, lets face it, only 30% of all cotton today is spun 40 and upwards so that can increase if the cotton was available and that is the point.

The market up the upper end has an enormous potential and if we can if we had to cop those grades.

Q: So for Australian growers, which direction should we be heading with our various quality parameters, how does our length compare and our strength and our micronaire with our competitors around the world?

A: Well I think that the problem that is now common is the question of neps of which is pre-occupying and that of course comes from one or two other factors, which is, involved which is somewhat immaturity mixed micronaires and so forth. I think that this is going to be a long-term project and I hope that the seed breeders will work on this in order to try, I believe in making uniform plants we need to have plants which all mature at the same time, it’s a long shot and it’s going to take some years.

But in the meantime we would like to see Australia concentrate in the short term on uniformity within the cotton plant, but it means to say uniformity in one plant or another to try improve uniformity within the bale. We have now modern machinery which has even the cards have video cameras inside them to detect the variation.

Those video cameras are very efficient but if of course there is to much variation it can’t, the auto-levellers which automatically try and correct for these defects which might be in the cotton, can’t keep up so if we can have an even running cotton I say to you that even if the micronaire that won’t tie is a little bit on the high side if it was even running in the high, that would be better than other characteristics that we talked about strength and length which are very important can compensate to a great affect this.

xSo your message is you are after consistency and that’s what you get with synthetics, consistency, and that’s what your asking our growers, to get a consistent product?

That is correct. Absolutely right. Consistency is learnt to be the most important so that we can see if one bale lay down the next and than that will compensate to a greater extent the problem which we have, a long term problem which is perhaps high micronaire obviously compensated to as we said by length, strength, uniform, length uniformity and the other factors.

I think that we talk a lot about neps, but neps we have to understand the origin and the simple origin is of course maturity and that is partly of the cotton not being uniform, the bottom bolls being different to bolls at the top, so there I think we maybe have short term solutions to improve the vision and that is what Australia has to work for to look for that special ‘niche’ market and not fight with the bread and butter cottons which are there.

Can you help Australian growers understand why high micronaire, which we’ve seen as a seasonal thing the last couple of seasons, how that impacts on a spinner, could you explain to us the impact of high micronaire to a spinner?

Its of course a rather technical explanation which is relatively simple if you think about it that the thicker the individual fibres the less you’ll get in a cross section when making the yarn and therefore the yarn will tend to be weaker because it has less fibres to twist on itself, so the thinner the fibres there are, the more fibres you can get and therefore the stronger the yarn. That’s very simple.

There of course are variations of dying ability which higher micronaire has. But the basic problem, the courser we get, the width of the yarn will come for a given number of fibres in a cross section of a yarn.