With a vision to become one of the world’s largest knit fabric manufacturers, offering top quality and innovative fabrics at competitive price to the deepest corners of the world, Mercury today has emerged as a name to reckon with. Since its inception about a decade back, Mercury has gone from strength to strength to achieve an annual production capacity of 4000 metric tonnes and is now poised to increase the same to 5000 metric tonnes in near future. Today, Mercury is one of the most modern knit fabric manufacturers with a fully equipped dyeing and processing unit in Bawal on Delhi-Jaipur National Highway covering about 12,500 sq.m. of built up area. In an interaction with Team Apparel Online, Babbu Sachdeva, Managing Director and Rahul Sachdeva, Director share their strategy for growth.
Babbu Sachdeva is particularly upbeat of the product library which has been created at the corporate office in Okhla to cater to his clients’ need for new developments. “It is not a typical retail kind of showroom that we have created, but an exclusive space within our corporate office to display our latest developments in knitted fabrics, fashioned by our design and product development team for our existing and potential clients. Here the customer can have a look at the complete collection of new and old range available with us under one roof, comfortably and conveniently,” proclaims Sachdeva.
Having a major focus on product development, the company’s product library came up about a year back as an offshoot of the growing need to showcase the extensive range of fabrics that the company has to offer. Though the display room has all the ranges of knitted fabrics, some of which are in demand for years, the focus is to showcase more of specialized fabrics. The entire collection is regularly replenished as the R&D team is constantly working on new developments and the display room is always equipped with at least 1000 new developments. “Most of the developments are our own imagination.
My son Rahul who looks after the entire marketing, travels a lot, both internationally and locally, and wherever 
he finds something interesting he picks it up and brings it to the PD division where they see possibilities to adapt it to our manufacturing facilities at Bawal (near Delhi). Nevertheless we also develop fabrics as per the buyer’s specifications,” shares Sachdeva according to whom none of the customers go back dissatisfied when they visit their product library.
Mercury is a very versatile manufacturer and is experimenting with poly mix blends with extensive use of lycra additions in all kinds of blend of fabrics be it micro modals, cotton modals, lyocell and tencel. Talking about the latest developments by Mercury, Sachdeva shared that this year they have done a lot of linen blends with polyester, viscose, 100% linen and various kinds of slubs have been developed. “We work very closely with yarn companies for various blends and seeing our enthusiasm and commitment, every mill is very keen to support us for any kind of yarn required by us, if it is practically possible to produce,” avers Sachdeva who procures all the raw materials from India and feels that the quality of yarns from China is still a big question mark.
Mercury for quite some time is contemplating the option of getting into manufacturing of printed knitted fabrics. “We had plans to get into printing last year but unfortunately that could not take place, but very soon we will be expanding to offer complete solid and print solutions for the garment industry. We have almost 50,000 sq.m. area allocated for this project and are just waiting for the right time to get into printing. There is a huge market around the world for printed knitted fabrics and as of now there are just a few companies in India producing it; it’s basically China’s strength,” claims Sachdeva.
Though Sachdeva is quite positive about the present situation of the industry, he cautions that the only key to success is the age-old concept of ‘survival of the fittest’, i.e. if one is innovative, progressive, schedule bound and meeting all the commitments made to clients then there is no dearth of business. “Normally, a fabric company is not booked to capacity for 2-3 months, but we generally have orders for the next 2-3 months,” points out Sachdeva who is proud of the fact that they are growing by 30% YOY. “I want to maintain this kind of growth, which is sustainable with the kind of setup we have, and also meet the quality and market commitments to take the company to the next level,” concludes Sachdeva.
