A Sunday Telegraph interview with Accsys Technologies chief executive Paul Clegg in March underlined the transformation the modified timber specialist has undergone in five years.
Mr Clegg maintains the business is now set to see the true international market potential of its acetylated Accoya timber and Tricoya sheet materials being exploited. Licensing deals with Belgian chemicals giant Solvay to make the former and Coillte Panel Products to make Tricoya fibre, held the prospect for "multiple manufacturing plants across Europe".
Mr Clegg acknowledged, however, that getting to this point had been a battle. According to the Telegraph report, in 2008, the year before he took over, Accsys had been "haemorrhaging cash" at the rate of up to €2.7m a month. Despite market capitalisation of €600m, its then international licensing strategy had also been "flawed". Its €27m demonstrator plant in Arnhem was being operated primarily as an R&D facility and "placing a huge drain on the balance sheet", and the recession made things far worse. As a result, while a €50m new production facility came on stream at the Netherlands site, Mr Clegg had to undertake a major restructure. A third of jobs went and overheads were slashed 25%.
The company’s aim remained ultimately to sign up manufacturing licensees, but the new strategy was to win them over by seeding their markets with Accoya products, including joinery, cladding and decking, made with wood from Arnhem. This, said Mr Clegg, has now paid off. At the last report, Accsys had 57 distributor and agency deals for such products in 45 countries. These pushed up demand for Accoya 58% to €18.4m in the nine months to December 2013, while sales of acetylated fibre to Medite hit €1.9m.
Increased Interest
The market seeding approach also increased interest among prospective Accoya-manufacturing licensees, including Solvay, which signed its 15-year deal in December.
The agreement will see it producing Accoya in one or more plants for sale in 47 European countries, excluding the UK, Belgium, Ireland, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. The initial target output is 63,000m³ a year, Solvay already has more than 100 factories worldwide, among them plants making acetylated cellulose ‘tow’ for cigarette filters.
"In fact, it’s the leading tow producer, and has over 80 years’ acetylation experience," said Mr Clegg.
Besides this heritage, he added, Solvay has experience with Accoya, having been one of Accsys’s market seeding partners.
"They’ve already run a trial with Accoya decking in Germany and France via 80 sales outlets, a number they’re set to double this year," said Mr Clegg.
Solvay is now deliberating whether to set up its acetylation plant in Freiberg, or in Arnhem on land owned by Accsys. According to Mr Clegg, it is also undertaking logistics modelling for scaling up output in the future.
"There are still processes to go through, but we anticipate their plant starting up in 2016," he said.
With sales of Medite Tricoya "going great guns", Mr Clegg was also upbeat about the timescale for Medite setting up its own plant in Ireland to make the acetylated fibre, after signing its licensing deal last July.
"We’re working furiously on the full design of the chip acetylating process to meet their needs and expect to deliver it this fiscal year," he said.
In a further development, Medite is set to supply Tricoya modified wood fibre to Chilean panel producer Masisa as an interim measure while the South American company gears up to launch its own modified MDF product, Masisa Tricoya Super MDF.
Following the extension of an agreement with Tricoya Technologies, Masisa will have exclusive production and distribution rights for the South American market, excluding Brazil.
