How to use a Costly Material to bring Membrane Treatment costs down

How do you successfully drive a Company from its first baby steps up to an exit to a prominent player? (?? audio version here)

That's what we will learn today by following Sebastian Andreassen's path:

I'm of the firm belief that you should focus on what you're good at!

In the Andreassen family, that was sound expertise in Silicon Carbide, which they sensed could impact the Membrane Water Treatment market.

Kind of a paradox, right? Take a very costly material and believe that you can make membrane treatment less expensive!

Yet, in a membrane market that nears the $2Bn/year and a membrane system market that went over $5Bn/year, it is hard to believe that the dominant solution can be perfect for every use case.

Indeed, polymeric membranes require a certain amount of care in pre-treatment to protect them from scavengers, and:

You can only use a certain amount of chemicals a certain number of times, and to some degree, you destroy the membrane whenever you clean it

So, if ceramic membranes in general and silicon carbide ones, in particular, could not win a one-to-one comparison with polymeric ones on CAPEX, levels were much closer on TOTEX, especially for demanding applications.

And that's the second key to success you shall copy: focusing on finding a product-market fit.

It started with targetting special drinking water and wastewater applications, with a very straightforward approach: proposing the company's solutions where everything else failed!

It then continued with defining the right package:

Ideally, we wanted to do the membrane and nothing else! But we reacted to market feedback and developed our own module.

That turned out to be the right size for the "lego brick" Cembrane was supplying to the rest of the Water Industry's food chain.

We focused on making the silicon carbide better and less expensive and worked with a long-range of OEMs to make it perform to its fullest

As a result, the ceramic membrane's cost was divided by 10 between 2014 and today, and many process companies started embracing the product to build new treatments around it.

This success attracted SKion Water's attention, under the costume of its subsidiary Ovivo, which acquired Cembrane in November 2021. What does it change?

We now have more resources at our disposal: we can continue what we were doing but at a faster pace!

As an example, the company just built a US twin of its danish factory to double its production capacity and address the North American market.

?... we want to take the market by storm!

You see, that's probably the third key ingredient: ambition.?

And it doesn't seem to fade out, even after opening a new leg in this entrepreneurial journey!

We also covered:

• How ceramic membranes' higher flux results in a 4-1 better energetical ratio than polymeric ones
• How you can scientifically prove your plant to work over 20 years when your oldest reference is 6 years old
• How ceramic membranes may be easier to operate but also have their own threats, like the ceramic plates you may have at home
• How challenging it is to introduce new technology in the water treatment industry, where risk-taking isn't exactly embraced
• How the deal with Ovivo was built over time and sounded like a natural evolution?
• How that comes with its own challenge, by somehow becoming a competitor to the existing customer base in certain geographies
• Building a company that's here to stay, outpacing the market, taking calculated risks - and how it does not always turn well, innovation through implementation... and much more!?

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