Summary
¦ Accsys’s Arnhem plant has increased capacity to 40,000m³ a year.
¦ 100,000m² of Medite Tricoya MDF has been sold in the last six months.
¦ A new European production licence for Accoya is in negotiation.
¦ A Tricoya MDF production licence option for Latin America has been concluded.
¦ New species are being used for Accoya.
The interview with Paul Clegg comes to a rousing end as a military band trumpets past his company’s modern new Windsor offices en route to the castle at the end of the road. It’s a fitting conclusion to a conversation with the chief executive of Accsys Technologies. You won’t find anyone banging the drum more enthusiastically for his business: the manufacture and market development of modified wood.
He’s convinced that the time is right for the material generally and that market conditions and dynamics will play even more in its favour in the future. He’s also confident Accsys’s own products, acetylated solid wood Accoya and acetylated fibre-based Tricoya MDF, have put down firm foundations from which to capitalise.
At the same time there’s nothing starry-eyed about Accsys’s outlook. Mr Clegg is also frank that it has not all been plain sailing to date and that there’s still work ahead to truly realise modified wood’s potential.
Challenges
In particular, he acknowledges that the last few years have posed challenges. When he arrived at the business in 2009 its 30,000m³ capacity plant in Arnhem in the Netherlands was well-established. Radiata pine-based Accoya’s ability to match hardwoods in terms of strength and durability was also increasingly proven. But the company was some way off profitability and had just three distributors. Then recession struck.
“We had to restructure and focus on making Arnhem a commercially viable operation, which unfortunately included cutting our head count by a third,” said Mr Clegg.
Another issue was Accsys’s relationship with Hong Kong company Diamond Wood. It was set up to build an Accoya factory in China with capacity of 70,000-140,000m³ a year. In the interim it was taking around 40% of Arnhem’s output to develop the Chinese market.
“Thanks to the hostile financial environment, their planned initial public offering to fund the factory didn’t happen,” said Mr Clegg. “It is still their goal, but it’s a situation we’re keeping under review and the volume of Accoya going to Diamond Wood is now 5% of our output.”
Tough though aspects of Accsys’s retrenchment may have been, it has paid off. “We now have a strong core team, with everyone from sales and business development, through technical support, R&D and production co-ordinated and working closely in parallel.” The UK office move from central London to Windsor, half an hour from Heathrow, he said, gave added focus.
“The result is that we’re now regarded as a viable, well-run company and a consequence of that has been our success in securing €30m of new investment between 2009 and 2011.”
In the last three years the Arnhem plant has also increased capacity to 40,000m³.
“This has come purely through advances in processing,” said Mr Clegg. “We’re basically better at the job and there’s probably scope for further improvement.”
Expanded distribution
Most significantly, Accsys has expanded its Accoya distribution base to 35 companies. Its principal markets remain the UK, Netherlands and Germany, but its distributors now cover over 40 countries.
This not only gives Accsys a wider sales base, but additional input on market and product development. “Each year we hold a distributors’ conference,” said Mr Clegg. “It’s their opportunity to share experiences of the product and give us input on how it’s being used in their markets and where we should perhaps focus R&D. It’s valuable for everyone.”
One recent outcome of this kind of customer market and technical liaison was developed in conjunction with the UK’s International Timber and NFP Europe and shown by the former on Accsys’s stand at Ecobuild.
“It’s a laminated window scantling, using Accoya as the weather surface, with softwood lamellas on the interior, bringing the product more into the mass market,” said Mr Clegg.
End users
Accsys also continues to work directly with end users, guiding them through their introduction of the material. Some, as a result, have switched to Accoya for a sizeable proportion of production.
“One example is the Sash Window Workshop, which is one of London’s leading replacement sash window suppliers, and another is Westgate Joinery which uses Accoya for premium windows and a range of other products,” said Mr Clegg.
Accsys also continues to put Accoya through independent trials to prove its technical credentials. Following earlier research at BRE, showing it had an exterior above ground service life of 60 years (as did Tricoya), cladding samples have now beaten Siberian larch and pine in durability and coating performance tests at TRADA.
The more this kind of data reaches the market, said Mr Clegg, and combines with end users’ own experience of Accoya’s durability and low maintenance, the more price competitive it becomes. At €1,200-1,400 per m³ it’s “less expensive than some hardwoods, but more than others”. “Life cycle analysis and whole life costs are increasingly been taken into account in the market and these reduce or eradicate any price differential,” said Mr Clegg.
Accsys has also continued trialling its acetylation process – which alters timber’s molecular structure to make it less hygroscopic – on more species. A recent result is alder Accoya, giving the species potential new exterior applications.
Tricoya from strength to strength
Meanwhile Tricoya MDF goes from strength to strength. Launched two years ahead of schedule in 2011 in association with Coillte Panel Products, with its product branded Medite Tricoya, 100,000m² has been sold and it has been taken up by leading distributors and stockists. In the UK, these include James Latham, Meyer Timber, DHH and Arnold Laver.
Billed as the highest performance, most water-resistant exterior MDF, Medite Tricoya was described by one stockist at Ecobuild as the product of the future. But, he added, it was so ground-breaking the market was “scratching its head over the perfect use”. That doesn’t concern Mr Clegg, however.
“There isn’t one ideal use, more like 25!” he said. “It’s being used for shop fronts and floors, doorskins and, in the Netherlands, for cash dispenser surrounds. Customers are also making it into giant floor tiles, moulding it and experimenting with various coatings and finishes. We don’t know its limits yet.”
Reinforcing Accsys’s positive outlook is a new long-term supply and collaboration deal with BP for its acetylation chemical, acetic anhydride. “It’s not the sort of thing they do lightly and underlines their confidence in us and our plans,” said Mr Clegg.
The BP deal also ties in with another Accsys ambition now close to fruition; to make Arnhem a “hub at the centre of a number of spokes”, leading not just to manufacturers and distributors, but also licensed Accoya and Tricoya producers worldwide. Part of the BP arrangement is that it will supply licensees and help perfect their acetylation process.
“Another reason we’re trialling other species is also to give licensees options using locally available timber,” said Mr Clegg.
An Accoya licence is expected to be signed soon with a company described as a “€20bn conglomerate”. It would give them 25-year exclusivity for Accoya in Europe. “Once it was in place, Arnhem’s role would be to seed other markets,” said Mr Clegg. “It’s a complex negotiation, but we’re hopeful it will be completed this fiscal year.”
Licensing agreements
Accsys sees licensing arrangements for Tricoya outside the UK, Ireland and Netherlands, where Coillte has exclusivity, potentially working differently. “As well as separate plants producing the fibre, they could be integrated into sheet materials production lines,” he said. “And not just by MDF producers. Tricoya acetylated wood fibre could be a feedstock for other panel types and the fact that, unlike solid wood acetylation, the fibre process is species agnostic, gives still greater flexibility.”
It was announced last week that the first of these new arrangements, to produce 90,000m³ of Tricoya MDF a year for Latin America, had now reached “licence option agreement” stage with an MDF and chipboard manufacturer.
Giving Accsys and its plans added impetus is rising pressure on the timber sector to ensure the sustainability and legality of its material – pressure that will grow in Europe with the introduction of the anti-illegal wood EU Timber Regulation (EUTR) next year.
“The incentive to substitute certain hardwoods with availability, environmental or legality question marks against them exists already and is bound to increase with the EUTR,” said Mr Clegg. “And it perhaps tells a story that the big prosecution under America’s equivalent of the Regulation, the Lacey Act, is Gibson Guitars, and we’re now supplying a UK manufacturer Accoya for his guitar bodies!”
Final confirmation of Mr Clegg’s optimism is his contention that you can now draw parallels between the “path of travel” of modified timber and that of MDF 30 years ago. “It started as an unknown quantity and developing awareness and acceptance took time, education and marketing,” he said. “But it gradually proved its worth and today we wouldn’t be without it.”
