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Industry news Filtration+Separation January/February 2014
SWM INTL moves into filtration by acquiring DelStar
New funding and management for FilterMag International
Specialty paper producer Schweitzer-Mauduit International Inc (SWM INTL) has acquired DelStar Inc from investment firm American Capital Strategies in a US$231.5 million cash deal.
Magnetic filtration specialist FilterMag International has raised US$2.5 million in a private Series A preferred share offering to accredited and strategic investors.
Headquartered in Middletown, Delaware, DelStar is a custom manufacturer of plastic and metal components used in filtration. Products include extruded netting, apertured films, meltblown media and extruded cores. While the majority of DelStar’s revenue comes from filtration products, namely reverse osmosis and other water filtration applications, the company has a broad customer base in a wide range of industries and market segments, including fast-growing specialty industrial filtration segments, as well as in healthcare, automotive, industrial, food, electronics and textiles. “The acquisition of DelStar creates an attractive growth platform in an adjacent business area for SWM as we greatly expand our presence in advanced materials, focused in large part on filtration,” said Frederic Villoutreix, chairman and CEO of SWM. “This combination offers substantial opportunities to co-develop composite materials, bring paper-based filtration products to DelStar’s broad customer base, and leverage
Naltex® extruded netting from DelStar.
SWM’s global infrastructure and capital to support accelerated growth efforts for the DelStar franchise. Although attractive purely on a standalone basis, DelStar is an ideal cornerstone acquisition on which we can build a meaningful critical components platform with a focus on filtration.” Mark Abrahams, DelStar president and CEO, said: “We could not be more pleased with SWM’s choice to bring DelStar Technologies into their family. The combined resources of both enterprises will strengthen our ability to pursue promising opportunities in our base business as well as potential acquisitions. Together, I know we can deliver innovative advanced solutions to our diverse customer base.” www.swmintl.com www.delstarinc.com
Desalitech partners with Toyo Engineering Desalitech and Japan’s Toyo Engineering Corp have entered into a strategic partnership to introduce water and wastewater treatment solutions to Japanese, East Asian and international markets. The collaboration will bring Desalitech’s Closed Circuit Desalination (CCD) reverse osmosis (RO) solutions to East Asian and other international markets to increase water recovery, improve energy efficiency, reduce environmental
impact and bring down disposal costs. “Our goal is to reduce our customer’s water and energy footprint while increasing process reliability and flexibility,” said Kumar Akhilesh, Toyo senior executive officer and Infrastructure business unit director. “This combination of better performance and greater environmental responsibility is important for Japanese and global markets.” www.desalitech.com
This new capital will be used to accelerate time-to-market initiatives and stimulate revenue growth. The funding will also be used to secure strategic partners and international distributors serving the mining, oil & gas, heavy construction, trucking and transit, marine and manufacturing markets. FilterMag has also put new management in place by appointing Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor Herbert Martin as CEO. Martin, who has broad experience growing start-up and mid-cap companies, has served as CEO of a number of venture-backed
private companies including Mercator, which was sold to Onyx Systems, Wollongong, which was bought by Attachmate, and Salira Optical Network Systems, which was acquired by Hitachi Data Systems. Scottsdale, Arizona-headquartered FilterMag is a global provider of magnetic filtration solutions that improve the life expectancy, system reliability and uptime of strategic capital equipment assets while lowering operating costs. The patented FilterMag products use custom-designed, heat resistant Neodymium alloy magnets that are mathematically optimised and magnetically modelled for applications to substantially reduce the presence of harmful particles from oil, hydraulic and fuel systems. www.filtermag.com
H2O Innovation wins new contracts in Canada’s oil & gas industry H2O Innovation Inc has secured new water treatment contracts worth C$6.5 million in Western Canada’s energy sector. Two major contracts were awarded by an independent energy company engaged in the exploration, development and production of natural gas and oil in North America. Under the two contracts, H2O Innovation will design, build and commission a potable water treatment package as well as a wastewater treatment package for a 2300-person worker camp in Northern Alberta. H2O Innovation delivered two similar units to the same client last autumn. The potable water treatment plant, which includes provision of raw water pumping, filtration using cartridge filters, ultrafiltration and reverse osmosis as well as chlorination prior to storage in an above ground bolted steel potable water storage tank, will produce 575 m3/day of fully treated potable water. H2O Innovation will also supply a 517.5 m3/day membrane
bioreactor (MBR) wastewater treatment plant consisting of raw wastewater pumping, anoxic and aerobic tanks, membrane tanks, disinfection by ultraviolet light and discharge to an engineered disposal field. “Our expertise in water purification and sewage treatment, our value-added design and our ability to execute and deliver on time are some of the key factors that have enabled us to secure this second project,” explained H2O Innovation president and CEO Frédéric Dugré. A third contract, awarded by an international company operating in Alberta that specialises in in-situ oil sands production, will see H2O Innovation design, build and commission a membranebased water treatment package to treat well water for domestic use within a central processing facility. www.h2oinnovation.com