India's Kay Ventures aims to turn Karur into knitwear hub

India’s Kay Ventures has teamed up with Hydra Micro Business Solutions Pvt Ltd to convert Karur, the home textiles hub in Tamil Nadu, into a global knitwear centre.

The effort started in 2016 and Kay aims at expanding its knitwear capacity to 10,000 machines in the next four years, according to Sampath Kasirajan, managing director of the latter.

Kasirajan’s company’s Hydra ACI is an economic framework that makes it possible for multiple entities to collaborate, think and function like a single entity on a single platform.

“Hydra ACI offered me the perfect template to turn my vision into a scalable model leveraging the 'repeatability' of the format to deploy simultaneously at multiple locations,” said Kay Ventures' CEO Susindran Swaminathan,  in an interview.

The Kay Ventures Knitwear Cluster in Karur annually produces 7.5 million pieces of knitwear, predominantly for leading domestic brands and export.

Efforts are under way to increase the capacity to 20 million pieces per annum to accommodate more orders in the near term, Swaminathan added.