One year ago, KCL was sold to management and private investors. Consequently, there is a significant interest to learn how this over 100-year-old privately owned entity performs. The answer is quite simple – it’s performing pretty well. KCL’s revenue grew, all existing clients continue or even increase their co-operation, and new clients emerge. Hence, there is evidently a need for KCL piloting services and development projects. The good performance during the first year encourages us to improve our services and develop new competences. The most important targets for year 2024 are:
- KCL will start relocating to new premises during 2024-2025. The current pilot hall in Otaniemi is too small and does not support growth opportunities. Therefore, KCL has rented a new 10 000 m2 industrial hall in Lohja, about 40 km from Helsinki, providing more space for current and new pilot machines and improving KCL’s capability to provide warehouse services for our clients’ materials. KCL aims to minimize the downtime of services and provides schedules for individual machine relocations well in advance.
- KCL has a strong focus on coating services and aims to be the number one independent coating trial site in the world. This implies investments to improve our extrusion and dispersion coater capabilities and increase the number of laboratory tools for coating. The target is to provide a large range of tools to test different coating strategies in laboratory scale and subsequently allow their evaluation in practically full-scale piloting trials.
- The world is moving towards the era of green transition. The green transition is not new to KCL, as we have been a green transition company for over 100 years. Therefore, our target is to provide a versatile portfolio of pilot tools for companies working with novel green materials. KCL has a wide selection of devices and experience in many essential processing areas, including material refining, pressurized reactions systems, continuous extraction methods, high pressure filtration systems, thickening and water removal techniques. These devices and techniques can be tested as isolated units, or they can be combined to create unique pilot processes. Clients can even bring their own devices to create completely new pilot processes.
- In 2023, several clients inquired about KCL’s participation to more long-term development projects. In response, KCL strengthened its personnel with new engineers and PhD level specialists, thereby providing new expertise and insight into challenging client development projects.
I would like to thank all of our business partners for their efforts and trust and look forward to creating continued success in 2024!
Marko Lauraeus, CEO