Interhides to sell wet blue and wet white to ‘the right partners’
13/03/2019
The company has told World Leather that it had a series of meetings set up at the APLF exhibition in Hong Kong (March 13-15) at which it hoped to push its plan forward.
General manager, Chris Thumrongsakunvong, explained that the idea centres on being able to sell A and B grade hides, at wet blue or wet white stage, to tanners. He said IHL envisions working with tanners who are producing high-quality finished leather for customers who are looking for consistency and quality.
World Leather visited IHL’s tannery in Bangpoomai at the start of 2017 for the sixth Tannery of the Year Programme, in which the Thai tannery emerged as the global winner. At that time, it had the capacity to process 2,000 bovine hides per day. Since then, it has doubled this figure, having completed a new building on site measuring 10,000 square-metres next to its raw-to-blue plant.
Sixteen liming and tanning drums are already in place there, along with an extensive hide-transportation system from Feltre in Italy. IHL expects operations to begin there before the end of March and there is space in the new building to duplicate this set-up if market demand is strong enough to justify the investment in further new technology.
Mr Thumrongsakunvong said he was aware of previous attempts in the industry to sell pre-graded semi-finished hides. He said those initiatives had fallen short of hoped-for levels of success because the wet-end tanners retained the problem of also having to find buyers for hides of lower quality than A or B. “We will not have that problem,” he explained, “because we will use those lower grades ourselves in our production of corrected-grain, embossed automotive leather. We will not be a pure-play wet blue supplier because we can take the C grades further in house. For this reason, I think this idea, slowly but surely, will work.”
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