Spinners in Tamil Nadu's textile hub Tirupur have faced acute losses recently as their supplies of polyester and cotton yarn failed to find purchasers. They had to effect a 30% production cut to buttress prices. To help them crack the demand-supply challenges they have designed a mobile app. The app provides a platform for mills to update the last-sold price of their yarn, stock position and related market data.

Prabhu Damodharan, secretary of Indian Texpre neurs Federation, who are putting into paces this idea in the Tirupur market said that the larger issues of global trade are cyclical and beyond their scope of problem-solving, but there is a quick-fix on the domestic front. Historically, the only way their mills came to know of the prevailing rates were the good old word-of-mouth transmission.

The entrepreneur consortium has carved out 80 mills operating in polyester and polyester yarn with a capacity of 20-lakh spindles for this pilot. The survey will be conducted periodically in a month to arrive at a standard price list of yarn from Tamil Nadu mills, which holds at a huge sway in the northern yarn markets.

Deepa Lakshmi, joint managing director at Ellen Textiles in Coimbatore said that if she is selling for, say Rs 190 a kg, and a neighbouring mill did it at Rs 200, it means someone is fleecing her Rs 10 for every kilogram she sells. This application can plug that hole in the system.

To prevent any animosity between mills, the application protects the identity when data about prices and stock are put in. What is available for every one to see are pure statistics such as average yarn selling price over the last week and average stock positions.

Entrepreneurs have begun adding mills from Andhra to the application to widen limits of the survey .

The results of this exercise have begun to show. In last four months, excess capacity gave buyers the upper hand and led prices of polyester cotton yarn down from Rs 185kg. Over the past few weeks in operation, the new system has helped Tirupur mills to find buyers for their yarn as high as Rs 161 kg. The average hovers around Rs 155kg now.

For mill owners often boggled by the complexity of the market, the app is a guide.