T
Nowadays, Fitexar is under the leadership of António Alexandre and Manuel Falcão, the founder’s grandsons, who are now the sole shareholders. With 70 years of history, the company is still in great condition and investing to master the technical yarn market. ‘We’ve come to bring new ideas,’ the two told T Jornal.
‘I joined the company about five years ago, my brother joined about a year ago. Since I joined the company, we’ve started the process of taking over the business from our father, which was done little by little and is now 100% finalised,’ explains António Alexandre.
With the transfer of the company, Fitexar was also detached from the Falcão group, he says: ‘We did a kind of spin off from the Falcão group and there was a total separation for strategic reasons. We’re focussing solely on yarns’.
From 2021 to the present day, the company has made several investments in machinery to be able to work in new segments with greater added value.
‘We want to get away from the traditional textile market and move into the technical textile market. We are, for example, very focused on growing in the medical sector,’ continues António Alexandre. ‘That’s where we’ve grown the most in the last two years. We have some clients in Portugal, but mainly abroad,’ he says.
‘It’s a difficult sector where there’s a lot of regulation, and it can take years for us to be able to work with a new client (we have a client that produces haemodialysis filters with Fitexar yarns, which are in contact with blood, and we developed this know-how in-house and it took almost five years to have the product approved),’ he points out.
The investment in new machinery to be able to respond to this very specific segment was part of a 2020 productive innovation project. ‘Finished last year, it also included coating machines to make elastane yarns. We wanted to increase our capacity in coated yarns with the best technologies on the market, also for other technical areas such as sports/seamless and work-wear,’ he said. Among the products for work-wear, they have already developed, for example, a technical yarn for anti-cut gloves, which incorporates glass fibre. In sports/seamless, Fitexar has increasingly focused on developing elastane yarns and Mélange yarns under its own brand (Fitmix).
But that’s not all: they’ve also bought a new automatic yarn texturising machine to start working on other innovative projects: ‘the new machine was an investment of around 1 million euros, which will arrive next June,’ he says, adding that by the end of 2025, an investment of another 2 million euros is planned for the PRR BlueBiotech project.
As part of its decarbonisation policies and targets, Fitexar is also considering an investment of 200,000 euros. The company has also invested in photovoltaic panels for self-consumption in the past.
All this investment ‘was only possible due to the company’s performance over the last two years’. From 2021 to 2022, Fitexar grew by 30 per cent, and from 2022 to 2023 it grew by 15 per cent. António Alexandre makes a point of adding that ‘The growth was not only due to production investments, but also to all the internal R&D projects, resulting from a continued commitment to technical and differentiating products.’