Garware
Indian innovation
AHILL station in the Indian state of Maharashtra may seem a world away from the Atlantic salmon farms of Scotland, Norway, Canada and Chile. But here, at a factory in Wai, is where the aquaculture industry’s favourite anti-predator nets are made, where novel solutions to sea lice are conceived, and where a potentially game-changing self-cleaning copper infused yarn is evolving.
It is also the place where the netting for one of Norway’s most exciting development concepts is being put together.
Garware Technical Fibres has undergone a transformation in the past decade, driven by the family firm’s third generation dynamic leader, Vayu Garware.
In the past year, the listed company, which is 51 per cent family owned, had a market cap of £265 million with profits up 19 per cent on the previous year, placing it in India’s top 500 league of businesses.
It has applied for 43 patents in the last five years; exports its products to 75 countries; and employs around 1,200 people directly, with many more, mainly women, involved in piecework in the local villages.
Garware is a big name in India and globally in the industries it supplies. The company scores high in Great Place to Work surveys, has won awards for individual products, and was ranked by Fortune India magazine as one of the top five value creators in India.
It all began in 1976 when Vayu Garware’s grandfather, Shri B.D Garware (fondly known as Abasaheb or ‘grandfather’), met the American owner of a company called Wall Industries on a plane to New York.
Described by his grandson as a ‘serial entrepreneur’, Abasaheb, then 72, was already making nylon yarn for fishing nets. But he was looking for one more business and set up a joint venture with his new American friend, primarily supplying polymer ropes to the Indian fishing industry.
He quickly outgrew his US partner and purchased all the shares, but the name, Garware Wall Ropes, survived – until a re-branding last year to Garware Technical Fibres.
Today, ropes are a much smaller part of the Garware portfolio, and are manufactured at the original factory, and company headquarters, located in Pune.
There, Vayu Garware explained to Fish Farmer how he has built on the legacy of his grandfather and father, Shri R.B Garware, to cement and expand his family’s fast growing technical textiles empire.
The current success, he said, can be traced back to a meeting he held with 25 of his key team nine years ago – and the mission statement they devised collectively.
‘We debated what is our purpose in coming to work every day, and what the purpose of this company is,’ he said.
‘Many companies have a mission saying they want to be at ‘x’ value of sales in so many years’ time, but we said, what happens after you do that, does the company no longer have a purpose? It has to have a purpose beyond that.
‘We employed an interesting process of silent brainstorming, people weren’t allowed to speak so they couldn’t influence others’ views.
‘They had to put what they thought were the key purposes in words, star them, top, next and third, and this was democratically added up and made into a statement.’
This- ‘Provide innovative, application focused solutions to enhance the value of our customers globally’, followed by four core values- is posted on boards around the company’s facilities and is at the heart of the Garware ethos.
‘We are a business to business company, all our customers are businesses, whether famers or fishermen,’ said Vayu.
‘They don’t buy our products based on look, or taste or smell. They buy it because it works in the application.
‘At the end of the day, our job, therefore, is to increase their profit, and the value of our customers around the world.
‘How do we do that? This is the big change that has happened in our company. We have always been very strong in manufacturing capabilities.
‘The area where we were weak was that while we could innovate around the manufacturing process, we did not understand well enough the application.’
Garware realised that the only way to deliver this value to customers was ‘by innovating, and innovating continuously’, and that meant getting to know their customers’ needs.
‘We brought on board application expertise – more than the customers, the end users, the people using the products such as the fishing captains [when fishing was the biggest business].
‘From really deep discussions with customers and application experts, we began to understand the true need.
‘This is the core of our DNA now – every strategy discussion we have revolves around how we deliver more value.’
Customer focus
The focus on customers, combined with improvements in manufacturing processes and productivity, has enabled the company to react fast to market demand.
Vayu said it took a few years to implement the new approach but he sees a clear correlation between the recent financial trajectory and becoming a ‘solution provider’.
‘Once we started to do that, our complexion changed as a company… we started to be a much more valuable partner to our customers.’
Now it is aquaculture rather than fishing that is the main part of the business, accounting for nearly one third of sales. The staff visit the farm sites themselves and the discussions with farmers are central to Garware’s innovation.
But adopting a new strategy alone would not have accounted for Garware’s growth, and much of the recent success can be attributed to the talents of the R&D department, led by Sanjay Raut.
Today, new products, with ‘new’ defined as no more than three years old, are fuelling the growth of the business with many innovations.
‘R&D is core for us. We are an Indian government recognised R&D centre and have 43 patents filed in the last five years – our R&D team has been reasonably busy,’ said Vayu, with some understatement.
“From really deep discussions with customers, we began to understand their true need”
The technology is all in-house, with a 25-strong cohort of scientists and engineers who, along with Sanjay, have become aquaculture experts.
They have devised a range of solutions for grow-out cages, predation, mooring systems, and sea lice control, in partnership with customers including Mowi, Cooke and Scottish Sea Farms.
Garware has made its name in the salmon industry with its Sapphire Sealpro HDPE anti-predator nets, and its Ultracore range (with steel) for Chile and Canada, where both sea lions and seals are a challenge.
Garware developed a better netting material made from polyethylene that is hydrophobic so it rejects water, while retaining its strength. But the problem was matching the tough breaking strength of nylon without increasing weight and size.
‘We were able to bring our polyethylene up to similar strength – a key breakthrough to allow us to give similar weight to cages that could fit on the mooring structures without overloading them in these much stronger materials,’ said Vayu.
‘We have cages in Canada that are eight years’ old, in high intensity sites, and are still not being retired – it may not be the best business model!’ said Vayu (tongue firmly in cheek).
Sapphire Sealpro is the main product used in Scotland against seals and Vayu is proud of news reports earlier this year crediting the netting with a drop in seal culling by Scottish Sea Farms. At the farmer’s Orkney sites, where Sealpro nets were first trialled in 2016, there have been no seals shot in three years.
Scottish Sea Farms said it will roll out the nets at all its farms, and Cooke Aquaculture also plans to install Sealpro at all its Shetland sites.
There is now a newer version, the SUC (Sapphire Ultracore) MBX, which has been on the market for two years.
‘It keeps all of the original properties but it’s just a better product in terms of stiffness and cut resistance,’ said Vayu. ‘That’s what makes the difference in not allowing these predators to get in.
‘The concept used to be to test mesh breaking strength. But we developed a concept
– with W&J Knox [see box, page 21] really partnering with us to explain to customers – that the properties they needed to measure were stiffness and cut resistance.’
To understand seal behaviour around nets, Vayu and his colleagues study videos provided by customers and are working with an international expert, Dr Andrew Trites, director of the Marine Mammal Research Unit at the University of British Columbia.
Garware is now the largest supplier of cage
netting to the salmon industry globally, said Shujaul Rehman, CEO, with about 90 to 95 per cent of the Canadian market.
‘All new requirements in Canada are with us, and we’re roughly 70 per cent plus in Scotland, and about 30 to 35 per cent of the Norwegian market – our partner there, Selstad, recently got the entire Norwegian Mowi contract for all regions.’
Garware only entered the Chilean market about five years ago and in the last three years the company’s new innovations ‘have really taken off’, said Rehman, and they now have about 25 per cent of the market.
But Garware’s customers are not just conventional cage farmers. In the net loft at Wai, the first of a big order for Norwegian firm Nordlaks was being prepared when Fish Farmer visited. At 11 tonnes, the giant net will be one of six for its development concept Havfarm.
This giant vessel will have 66 tonnes of nets in its entire structure – and Garware has secured the order.
Huge saving
Nordlaks has ordered all its Havfarm requirements based on successful trials of another Garware innovation.
This, the V2, is patented technology added to the nets to reduce fouling. It can cut costs of cleaning by up to 50 per cent, prevents copper oxide effluence, and has already won an Economic Times [of India] award.
Garware has received orders for 700 tonnes of V2 in the last couple of months, said Vayu, and two of its important customers have changed all of their 2020 requirements to include V2 technology.
‘The voice of the customer was that they need anti-fouling but don’t want sedimentation and paint chipping off, and we want to be environmentally friendly,’ said Vayu.
‘The ASC (Aquaculture Stewardship Council) says you can’t use high pressure washing on a coated net because the copper leaches and the paint chips and there is a lot of sedimentation on the seabed.
‘What we were able to do finally, after four years of work, was to, almost at a nano particle level, infuse the melted plastic with copper particles, and yet draw the yarn. The big challenge, for a plastic manufacturer, was drawing the yarn with these, so to speak, external bodies.
‘The net doesn’t require any coating and it literally gives off copper ions almost to create that small charge that then delays the fouling.
‘If you spin an anti-fouled net, you can see the amount of sediment that comes out. Do the same thing with this and the water is totally clear.’
During initial trials in Scotland, over 28 days in summer waters, the V2 net needed no washing compared to a non-V2 net that was cleaned after 12 days.
‘Our intention with the customer is that we should be able to double the time between cleaning cycles, which is a huge saving, but apart from that it has a big positive environmental impact,’ said Vayu.
‘The cleaning is also believed to disturb the fish and may leave particles in the water column so whatever you do to reduce the cleaning is good for the environment and good for the health of the fish.’
The V2 has now been trialled for 11 months in Scotland, with very good data from Garware’s farming partner.
In Chile, meanwhile, one customer tested the V2 in December 2018, during prime Chilean summer, with 64 days between cleaning cycles compared to the normal 15 days.
‘We are very clear it is working, delivering value, and the end result is all these orders that have come in.’
Sea lice skirts
In another section of the Wai factory, the Coated Fabrics division is pioneering pop up inflatable tents for the Indian army and fabric enclosures to house radar.
But applications here also include aquaculture, in particular a new
“
We’ve more than doubled the time between cleaning cycles but we want no cleaning cycles”
generation of sea lice skirt, designed to block lice but not water.
Most of the skirts are for 5-6m depths but research has shown that below 8m the reduction in lice counts is almost complete, Vayu said, so why don’t companies go down deeper?
‘One of the issues is that the dissolved oxygen gets badly impacted because of the water flow. The other issue is that when the currents are high, if the skirt does not let the water through, it tends to balloon out. Even if you have it at 5m, it ends up being only 3m and all the lice come in.
‘We developed a new, patented product called X12 that has a very high water flow. In a normal lice skirt, one litre of water goes through in seven and a half minutes and in the X12 fabric it goes through in six seconds.’
The water flow is so high that the dissolved oxygen and water exchange is very good, whereas the old lice skirts are more like tarpaulins.
In trials in Chile with square cages, two head cages were treated with X12 lice skirts and the rest were treated only using pharmaceuticals. After a full, 13-month cycle, there was a 55 to 60 per cent reduction in sea lice counts in the cages with the X12 skirts.
‘Additionally, the growth rate was better and they needed half the bath treatments,’ said Vayu. ‘This has been a very positive result.’
The yarns of this fabric can also be infused with V2 and that will be the next trial, due to start in Scotland last month, with data collected every month for the next year.
Future plans
In the rope factory in Pune, the R&D department has developed products for mooring systems with very low elongation.
‘A big cost we’ve seen in Chile is that when ropes elongate they have to be re-tensioned and this can be an extremely expensive operation,’ said Vayu.
Garware has come up with the X2 aqua mooring rope which has halved the number of re-tensions – ‘so payback on our product is within weeks’.
Future plans for the company include continuing research on how to provide an even better version of the V2.
‘We’ve reached the ability to more than double the time between cleaning cycles but we want to reach a level of no cleaning cycles. It’s a challenge – the net that doesn’t need to be cleaned but also doesn’t need a polluting anti-fouling coating– that’s where we want to go,’ said Vayu.
‘We’ll also work more on the sea lice skirteven with the high water flow there are issues
“We are a step by step company- we want to get the Havfarm done well and working” make sure it’s
of cleaning and lift up that we haven’t resolved totally. We are better than normal but we want to get even better and we already have the next generation on our drawing board.’
The Nordlaks project is the only Norwegian development concept Garware has taken on, so far- ‘we are a step by step company, we want to get the Havfarm done well and make sure it’s working’., said Vayu.
However, they have also been approached by another Norwegian company looking at a submersible cage for salmon, using Garware’s netting with a steel core that is able to form a wall underwater.
And there are opportunities in the sea bass and sea bream market in the Mediterranean, and closer to home as India develops its own offshore aquaculture industry.
‘We’re trying to participate with the Indian government – we’ve learnt a lot from outside India and these learnings should be useful,’ said Vayu.
‘We have plotted each market and where we want to be. Obviously, salmon cages are the upper end technically, industry wise and everything else, and we have to be clear we can add value, or it’s not sustainable. We’re not the low cost provider.’
Vayu’s father was around to witness the company’s diversification into aquaculture and he conceived the Wai plant. But what would his grandfather say if he could see the business today?
‘Hopefully, they would both be proud of the company. A technical director who worked with my grandfather said one of his favourite phrases was, ‘I like to be the only runner and therefore the winner in the race’.
‘He was always looking at new technology. When nylon was introduced here, he brought in a new spinning head, the only person in India to have it.
‘The intensity of competition was less then and there were more opportunities to be first. Now it’s not an opportunity to be first so much but an opportunity to innovate and deliver better value. Times change but we have to be on that track.’