Protim Solignum Osmose is not a name that trips off the tongue, admits the company’s chief executive Ian McConnell.
Since the acquisition by Osmose of Marlow-based Protim Solignum about 16 months ago, the name, laden with heritage but somewhat unwieldy, has been left in place, customer reaction to it assessed and plans for the company’s direction finalised.
‘What customers feel about our name is important,’ said Mr McConnell. ‘We have had all sorts of comments and have concluded that we are best presenting ourselves corporately as Osmose, with a distinct international and European corporate identity.’
The original Osmose started in 1934 in the US, based on a patent for a diffusible preservative which had been exchanged for valuable German assets controlled by the US government during Germany’s ‘isolationist period’.
While its core business has always been timber preservation, it has branched out over intervening years into a variety of related – and sometimes seemingly unrelated – business segments. In the US, for example, this meant marrying one of the most traditional of businesses with one of the most hi-tech: it added a GPS (global positioning system) data-tagging service to its chemical supply and treatment operation when it discovered that some of the massive telegraph and utility companies in the US didn’t actually know where most of their poles were located. Osmose saw an opportunity and there are now around 1,400 employees on the road in the US, checking poles for decay, treating if necessary and tagging.
The company is also involved in the steel and concrete-preservation industry; a marine division manufactures products to protect concrete, steel and timber piling in major ports around the world.
Having realised in the early 1990s that the preservation industry was becoming steadily more global in its outlook, Osmose also realised that it would quickly need to generate sufficient critical mass to meet its ambitious growth aspirations on such a big scale. So began a series of acquisitions and start-ups.
In Europe, this began in 1992 with the purchase of Danish firm Injector, followed by a ‘grass roots’ start-up of Injector Osmose in the UK in 1995. Sixteen months ago came the ‘restorative’ acquisition of Protim Solignum and finally, last July, the purchase of Rentokil.
Geography was a key consideration in laying the foundations for a global contender, as was the careful selection of companies for their breadth of skill, experience and product focus. ‘This whole mixture has been put together to represent the total corporate entity,’ said Mr McConnell. ‘It is about trying to integrate all these operations to produce the ability to have a pan-European company which has pan-European technical skills, language skills and product ranges. We are putting forward a comprehensive offering to the customer, which is unbeatable.’
Injector takes care of business in Scandinavia, where it is soon to be renamed Osmose, and it is making in-roads into the Baltic markets. In the UK, Osmose, Protim Solignum and Rentokil already control over 50% of the low and high-pressure markets and are aiming for more, while Rentokil has the ability to cover the French market, where Osmose has previously been active but in a small way.
The company has also developed a greater presence in Portugal, now a fairly big market, and has made ‘an introduction’ in Spain and other European countries.
‘Where there is economic growth, there is a need for timber preservation,’ said UK marketing manager Andy Hodge. ‘In addition, there are a large amount of exports now coming out of eastern Europe and Russia and it’s coming into Europe. We are attacking that from different angles; from the south with our southern European division and from the north out of Scandinavia.’
Gordon Ewbank, the company’s UK general manager, believes it is important to listen to the markets and to blend into them. ‘We are trying to keep a European structure and some standardisation so that we have a uniformity of quality and service but tailor-made to the individual requirements of each country,’ he said. ‘For example, Celcure is an incredibly strong brand in France and though it is recognised in the UK, it doesn’t quite have that strength. One has to tailor these things, within an overall umbrella, to regional requirements.’
In the UK, a service ethic is considered particularly important. ‘It is not sufficient just to have an attractive marketing campaign,’ said Mr McConnell. ‘You need to have the substance behind it. One of the key things that we pride ourselves on as a company is the engineering service and resource we have, both in terms of providing engineers to keep people with existing plants treating timber and the provision of new plant.’
Mr McConnell believes the company has most to offer in plant design and the development of new equipment and computer control systems. ‘We’ve put a tremendous amount of resource into making sure that we have very efficient and highly automated plant to offer our customers because the trend is towards bigger plants and fewer of them,’ he explained.
The return on investment on large facilities is much more attractive than on multiple smaller installations. However, for a treatment com-pany to consolidate operations in this way requires utter faith in a plant supplier’s engineering reliability, as it has to work continuously and efficiently. The company ensures a high level of quality by maintaining its in-house engineering and manufacturing facilities.
As well as providing its customers with the efficiency to gain an advantage in the market, it also aims to offer the widest possible choice of preservative products and delivery systems. Within the different brand families, particu-larly Osmose and Protim on the industrial side, there is a range of slightly different formulations tailored to market niches such as joinery, timber framing, trusses, decking and fencing. These products are designed to render the treatment process as cost-effective and efficient as possible in those markets – a dramatic change from the ‘variation-on-a-single-product’ offerings prevalent in the 1970s and 80s.
There are no fewer than eight product variants within the Protim family in the UK, with two main preservatives in the Osmose family, plus additives to convey qualities like water repellence where necessary.
‘We pride ourselves on having the widest choice of products available,’ said Mr Hodge. ‘Part of helping customers develop their business is to say "what markets are you trying to develop, what’s the best system for you?" and to work with them to try to make those choices.’
In keeping with a new corporate identity, branding has been restructured. Products have been arranged into distinct Osmose, Protim and Solignum product families. The Osmose brand covers high-pressure treatments, including existing CCA technology and any future developments in the field. There are two CCA products: Osmose’s own and the slightly different Celcure CCA brand it inherited from Rentokil.
A range of decking and outdoor timber for the DIY retail sector will also be marketed under the name of Osmose Lifewood. This brand is aimed squarely at consumers and the company is to undertake an education campaign to help them understand the benefits of preservation and promoting wood as a recreational material. The Osmose range also includes screws, fixings and decorative stains.
The Protim brand is already well established in the UK for low-pressure, double-vacuum treatment and is considered a key part of the company’s offering. It includes Drysol and Aqeos, the former a traditional organic solvent-based treatment and the latter one of a new generation of water-based treatments.
The Solignum brand comprises a range of canned preservatives and decorative wood finishes. Solignum, which is a popular brand as far afield as the Philippines and Nigeria, was conceived 100 years ago this year and to mark the occasion, the company is to re-launch the brand as the ‘original quality choice’ of the tradesman. New promotional and point-of-sale material is to be provided to stockists, along with technical support and even financial packages to help develop outlets if needed.
‘Solignum is a well-established brand that has, over the past 10 or 15 years, been let go,’ said Mr McConnell. ‘We are going to put life into an old dog and re-launch this brand in its own right. In doing all this we are clarifying the product range because, pre-Osmose, we were selling everything as Protim Solignum. We feel that there is much more clarity now.’
Mr Hodge said the aim is not to compete directly with major competitor brands such as Ronseal or Cuprinol but to emphasise the high-quality, premium nature of Solignum. ‘We are going to find our niche as providing a high quality traditional product for the builder or decorator who wants to make sure they are doing a high-quality job,’ he said.
Previous initiatives that proved so successful in developing brand awareness in the Philippines, for example, involved running 54 seminars in one year, each of which attracted about 170 carpenters.
Osmose plans to add more products to the range over the next 12 months. ‘Research and development is a top priority for us and we’ve got international R&D resources now,’ said Mr McConnell. ‘Being involved with the regulators and the industry at the national and European level is also crucial, not only to represent the interests of the industry but also to enable us to make well-informed decisions about our own developments.’
On a national level, any initiative promoting safety, quality and environmental responsibility in the industry is regarded by the company as an opportunity to respond with positive initiatives. It is an active member of many UK timber industry associations and also represents the industry in discussions with government at national and European level about what constitutes reasonable legislation. ‘Some aspects of legislation are politically driven and not appropriate for certain sectors,’ said Mr McConnell. ‘We care about how our products are used and totally support issues like responsible care but we also do whatever we can to keep legislation reasonable.’
While this has proved relatively easy in the UK, there have been problems in achieving this kind of influence in Europe, where things become ‘more complicated’.
‘The drive for product development is, internationally, the same in terms of the speed with which some of these products need to be implemented from country to country,’ said Mr McConnell. ‘But in some countries developments may be onto phase 2, in some we’re thinking about phase 3 and in others we’re still at phase 1 – it is very much on a country by country basis.
‘Osmose has now met its objectives to be a leading supplier in the preservation industry in Europe,’ said Andy Hodge. ‘The main objective was always to reach a critical mass and to be a major player in all areas and we’ve achieved that. In the UK, our key objective now is to make the whole market bigger – and that will benefit everybody.’
