The Texfor General Assembly has approved the change in the organization's presidency. Jaume Balaguer, member of the Board of Directors representing AITPA, assumes the presidency of the textile employers' association for the next 2 years, replacing José Mª MestresBalaguer concludes his six-year tenure at the helm of the organization. The new board of directors will be headed by Balaguer as president and Mireia Cazador as vice president.
With this change, Texfor begins a new stage in a particularly demanding context for the textile industry, marked by regulatory pressure, global competition, rising costs and the need to strengthen industrial capacity in Europe.
At the Assembly, Mestres and Balaguer shared the same concern: the need for companies to have a reasonable environment in which to invest, adapt and continue to add value.
During his term, José María Mestres has led a period of intense institutional and sectoral activity. In his address to the Assembly, Mestres highlighted the work carried out by Texfor in its dialogue with government agencies, its monitoring of the new Industry Law, and the signing of the new collective bargaining agreement for the period 2024-2026.
Regarding the new stage that Texfor is beginning, Jaume Balaguer has defended the need to to strengthen the strategic value of European industry, preserve productive capacity, knowledge and quality employment, and to address some of the major challenges facing the sector.
Among them, he pointed out the difficulty in incorporating new professionals, the proliferation of certifications, the importance of clearly applying the rules of origin and the need to enhance the prestige of "made in Europe" as an expression of quality, traceability, innovation and social and environmental commitment.
In his first speech as president of Texfor, Balaguer summarized this approach in one central idea: “without industry there is no autonomy, no innovation, no solid employment and no future.”
Jaume Balaguer has extensive business experience in the textile sector. He is the manager of the family businesses Textil J. Balaguer and Jaba Textil, which are dedicated to the production and manufacturing of cotton fabrics.
He also served as president of AITPA from 2012 to 2016, a period during which Texfor was consolidated as a leading textile employers' association for the various guilds within the sector. His profile combines technical knowledge, management experience, and a direct understanding of the entire value chain, from production to sales.
The General Assembly has concluded with the conference of Ignasi Sayol, president of the Logistics Cluster of Catalonia, under the title “Competing in an uncertain world: how technology can strengthen European industry.”
In his speech, Sayol argued that The European textile industry must move beyond competition based solely on labor costs and advance towards a model based on industrial sovereignty. Automation, artificial intelligence, traceability, and tools such as the Digital Product Passport.
In this sense, he has summarized the new equation for industrial resilience in four main levers: Process automation to gain efficiency and reduce errors, transparency throughout the value chain, strengthening data-driven talent and new industrial profiles, and more robust logistics, supported by nearshoring and the resilience of supply chainsIn his opinion, these elements should allow “Moving towards greater industrial sovereignty in the textile sector without sacrificing competitiveness”.
The closing session of the Assembly also included a speech by the Director General of Industry of the Government of Catalonia, Xavier Roca, who has claimed the role of Industry as an engine of value and employment and has moved the Government's commitment to support the sector in its technological transformation process through new lines of support.