19 minute read
2020: HOW WAS IT FOR YOU?
Eric Honkamp, sales manager for Cellusuede, reflects on the positives — quality family time, moving ahead with virtual technologies and a successful acquisition.
Well, we’ve made it to 2021! But 2020 was like the 1966 Clint Eastwood movie “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly”.
Let’s start with the Ugly.
Cellusuede Products’ sales went down 80% in April and 45% in May. This was due in large part to the closing of the auto manufacturers.
Moving on to the Bad.
Although we’ve recovered nicely, 2020 ended up — as I am sure will be the case with most of us — but down overall over the year before. We will just put an asterisk next to this year in the history books.
The in-person conferences, trade shows and meetings with personal conversations have also been dearly missed.
And now for the Good!
Along with the quality time spent with my family, I’ve been able to spend quality time in the office due to extraordinarily little travel since March.
It has been a valuable lesson learned in increasing the use of virtual technology and digital advertising. I’m sure I will not be alone with the thought that this will be used much more in the future, even after regular travel resumes.
Through all of the adversity, Cellusuede Products has this summer completed the acquisition and 100% ownership of Engineered Fibers Technology (EFT).
This addition will position us for growth into newer and emerging markets as we provide highly technical short-cut fibers. We are now able to offer nano-fibrillated fiber to lithiumion separator manufacturing along with our current pasting fibers.
The Cellusuede/EFT team and I are grateful for the support of our wonderful customers in the lead-acid battery industry. Although deemed an “essential business” through the various mandated shutdowns, it is evident and heartening to have us all pull together and work through these issues.
As for 2021, I believe we have come out of this stronger, wiser and more empathetic to all customers, suppliers and even competitors. Cellusuede/ EFT will continue to strengthen the relationships with our current customer base while strategically forging new partnerships with our expanding product offerings.
The year to come should be strong for energy storage and the lead-acid battery industry and all of us here at Cellusuede/EFT are excited to be a part of it.
If not before, I look forward to seeing everyone in September at the BCI in San Diego!
As years go 2020 will certainly be memorable for many reasons. After a relatively normal start we all experienced a sense of shock and then foreboding as the global pandemic took hold.
We watched with trepidation as China and then Italy bore the brunt of the initial wave, knowing it would spread.
And it did, with a vengeance.
From a business perspective the phrase ‘adapt and survive’ has been the approach taken by the lead and lead battery industries, and indeed associations. Everyone moved into crisis management mode, working out how to maintain manufacturing safely and how to keep staff as secure as possible.
In essence, how to keep calm and safe, and carry on. That’s exactly what happened and it is a credit to the industry and the lead battery value chain as a whole that most companies managed to adapt, and many went much further supporting their local communities and essential services.
It was the business equivalent of a handbrake turn, as almost everything became virtual: meetings, conferences, events all took place online and meetings in cyberspace became something of an artform as we mastered new meeting etiquette – from backdrops to virtual handraising.
While our industries kept calm and carried on, so did the legislative juggernauts with new regulatory activity, much of it emanating in Europe resulting from Green Deal policy objectives. This included important milestones related to the EU End of Life Vehicles Directive, Batteries Regulation, Occupational Exposure Limits for Lead, Lead Metal Classification for Environment, and several EU REACH Restrictions.
Looking ahead, and in the face of this blizzard of red tape, we will continue to defend and promote our industry and the important products and services that rely on us.
The winds of change look set to continue in 2021 as political momentum grows in favour of swifter action to tackle climate change, decarbonize industry and society and development of a new EU chemicals strategy for sustainability.
As political efforts gain speed, the demand for lead batteries will, according to most analysts, continue to grow. Even at a conservative estimate we are likely to see growth of around 2% a year as demand for rechargeable battery energy storage keeps pace with political imperatives.
Key to the battery industry’s future is, of course, innovation. The work of the Consortium for Battery Innovation will be pivotal as it brokers more projects ushering in more advances in lead battery performance and lifetime.
Meanwhile lead’s role in a range of other industries – while on a much lower scale – will also enter the spotlight as officials from the EU Chemicals Agency ECHA consider whether lead metal should be included on their list of substances subject to ‘Authorization’.
Working with downstream users we will be showing how lead in batteries and a wide range of applications — from aviation safety to cables linking offshore windfarms — really does matter in a modern, low carbon, and competitive economy.
This goes hand-in-hand with an industry determined to demonstrate that we are both essential and responsible.
We will continue to work together with our partners in Europe and North America to play our part helping to tackle informal and dangerous recycling practises in low and middle income countries, adopt responsible raw material sourcing policies and to ensure continuous improvement in company environment, health & safety performance.
We’ll be working with NGOs, and organisations including Unicef, to deliver improvement projects, and educate governments and regulators on practices necessary to tackle the issue.
And of course we all hope that in 2021 we will meet again — in person — duly vaccinated and batteries recharged.
Andy Bush, managing director, ILA
‘Our output and sales have doubled since 2019’
Zhao Zhanjun, head of battery firm Separator Technology (BengBu) Company gives the view from China, one of the first countries to get the Covid pandemic under control
Zhao Zhanjun
Separator Technology (BengBu)
So, what were your impressions of the year gone by?
2020 has been an unusual but highly dynamic year — a year that demonstrates Chinese entrepreneurs’ duties and responsibilities. Not only must we help each other, but we must do our best to help our friends and customers abroad to fight the plague that is the virus.
The Covid pandemic has changed our way of life.
In China, our joint and sustained efforts, the strictness of our measures and our self-awareness, has achieved success and the spread of Covid has been put under control.
How has your business fared?
Our business and operations weren’t affected by the pandemic. Rather the contrary, our output and sales increased by more than 100% over 2019, benefiting from our excellent quality and services.
Our separators’ ultra-high porosity 62%-72%) high, electrical resistance (30%-40%) lower than and antioxidation 20%-30% higher than those of the same backweb thickness from traditional competitors,
These three critical characteristics for good batteries are good reasons for more customers to choose us.
U*PRO, our ultra-high porosity PE separators applied for EFBs have achieved huge success by technology innovation. We are the opposite of traditional competitors’ theory of lower electrical resistance is achieved only by a thinner backweb, our thicker backweb still has lower electrical resistance.
We are the only company in the world that has the technology and ability to produce separators with 0.3 mm backweb thickness with only around 40mΩ·cm² electrical resistance.
These successfully solve the problems of a shortened life of EFBs and batteries for heavy duty trucks. They are hot sale and the demand for them keeps growing beyond our expectation.
Are there lessons to be learnt from the experiences of 2020? What are your plans for the year ahead? How do you see the new year playing out for your business and the industry as a whole?
The situation of 2020 makes us realize that technology advancements won’t stop — even though unexpected events can disrupt other parts of our industry.
This process will continue in the coming years. For ourselves, it is our focus on technological innovation which leads to yet newer products that will be developed from our existing product lines.
As a new generation PE separator manufacturer, technology advancement is the driving force for and plan to lead the evolution in battery technology as well.
So what were your impressions of the year gone by? How has your business fared? What were the highlights and lowlights?
The highlight of 2020 was our company’s team approach to the pandemic. Everyone adapted, covered for one another, and “went the extra mile.” When orders fell, our production workforce redeployed to capital projects.
For most of our staff, it was a personal choice to work from home and most split their time between home and office to maintain a safe environment. > continued on page 64
Terry Murphy
Hammond
For the challenges ahead...
> continued from page 62
My hat’s off to our IT staff as our business systems have allowed new working arrangement to function smoothly.
How was your sector of the industry affected?
The pandemic has been a rough patch for most, and we were no exception. We reduced salaries, offered a voluntary severance program, and took out a PPP loan.
I think we’ve seen the worst of the economic downturn, but I remain concerned for our workforce because reported Covid cases are surging as we enter the traditional cold and flu season.
Are there lessons to be learnt from the experiences of 2020?
We learned that in a crisis without precedent, political pressures may cause various levels of government to impose disruptive restrictions without sufficient consideration of their unintended and sometimes counterproductive consequences. That’s just humans acting under great stress.
On a brighter note, I hope one lesson learned is that society continuously depends on an installed base of lead battery back-up for our communications and emergency services.
Lastly, what are your plans for the year ahead? How do you see the new year playing out for your business and the industry as a whole?
As the pandemic has exposed systems fragilities, I see lead batteries playing a significant role in areas such as moving our electrical infrastructure into a micro-grid, distributed architecture.
This would mitigate requirements for large-scale transmission, improve system resiliency, and provide storage for renewable energy—all while reducing total CO2 emissions.
Doug Bornas, president of MAC Engineering is glad that 2021 is going to be a strong year ahead.
Doug Bornas
MAC Engineering
To start with my impressions for 2020, it was a year that will forever be etched into the memories of millions and millions of people.
A year that started off with great optimism derailed in a heartbeat by a life threatening virus that paralyzed an industry, a country and a world in its wake. While people had to take precautions like never before, to people frightened about getting the virus, to see people dying all over the world, this virus caused panic and confusion with debilitating effects.
While all this was going on, businesses were failing at an unprecedented rate, companies were struggling to survive, and workers struggling to make enough money to pay their bills. My lasting 2020 impression will always be ‘Thank heavens this year is OVER’.
Covid 19 caused many battery manufacturers to close down temporarily or reduce production in the early part of the epidemic. As a machine supplier to the battery makers, once they slowed down all future projects were put on hold.
This had a tremendous effect on our business as companies were no longer looking at purchasing new equipment, rather looking to get by and back up and running. Fortunately for us companies still needed to purchase spare parts to keep their existing lines running and this did help us to a point.
As far as lessons to be learned from Covid and 2020, we have all had many long days and months to think about this one. To say we should have all been better prepared for this really isn’t fair.
The US hadn’t seen anything like this since 1919 so to prepare for something that none of us were alive the last time it happened is just hard to imagine.
As a company, our immediate focus was on survival and still supporting our customers whenever they needed help or had issues. We took steps to keep our plant open, to keep our employees as safe as possible, all the while continuing production so our customers could count on the parts or machines they needed to weather this storm.
We needed our customers to survive, our customers needed us to survive, in a way we were brought closer together through this tragedy. It was a common enemy that everyone could relate to and one that everyone was affected by in some way, shape or form.
Lesson learned 2020, now hopefully we can close the book soon and move on.
We are looking forward to a rebound in 2021. One thing we continued in 2020 was our R&D. We have several new and exciting machines coming to the market in 2021 and are excited to unveil them.
We kept up all the R&D as best we could because we knew coming out the other side of Covid the companies that were going to survive and hopefully prosper needed to be ready to go. We expect 2021 to be our ‘Go’ year for us in this industry.
Claudia Lorenzini, Microporous’ vice president for sales and marketing gives a personal and business perspective to 2020. It’s been a rough ride she says
Claudia Lorenzini
Early in 2020 when the news about the new virus popped up in Wuhan, nobody expected what was going to happen later — how deadly the virus was going to be and how fast it would go and spread around the world.
In just a few weeks it was astonishing to see how much it had affected our lives, our families, our colleagues and our industry.
Some of our customers have learnt the hard way what the supply chain really is about.
When it hit Europe, and orders dropped, we had no contingency plan or forecast in place to go ahead. We introduced new short-time programs for maintaining production at a minimum, keeping our workforce safe and not losing skilled people. We learnt to home-office where possible for employees and at home we all became teacher, mum and dad and food provider at the same time.
I’ve missed seeing my customers, most of whom I’ve known for many years, I’ve missed hopping on a plane to different places. It’s likely I will need to learn again how to pack my luggage!
However, on the other hand, my kids enjoy seeing me, after 15 years it’s the first time for 10 months in a row. The same goes for my husband, the first time in almost 20 years we’re both at home, and we are still married!!
In Microporous, we suffered several unscheduled shutdowns until August. Then all of a sudden, the market returned with an unexpected order load for the automotive market and material handling industry business improved as well.
Well, that was before the second wave, but that affected our industry less, although it was much worse in numbers of infections and deaths versus the spring wave.
And next year? We are optimistic, there is no other way.
And then, besides Covid-19 and the efforts to reduce cost, ensure safety of our people and still keep our business running, in Brussels “The Framework Regulators” continue their work setting out the guidelines for the future of our business.
If a 30-year-old is applying for a job I am asked: “Will I still have a job here in 10 years”? Of course, I tell them, there’ll still be a job, there is no way that lead batteries are disappearing.
In the meantime, I am trying to get to grips with the implications of words such as “Horizon 30”, “WLTP (Worldwide Harmonized Light Vehicles Test Procedure)”, “Carbon Footprint”, the “Green Deal”, and last but not least the “Battery Passport” and what they mean for our industry.
While news of an effective vaccine is certainly positive, it will still take time to get our normal life back.
Meanwhile, car producers have decided to stop making the cars that we like to drive — just so they can follow these new regulations.
So we find ourselves in the situation of sitting at home during the lockdown explaining to our sons, who love Jeremy Clarkson, Top Gear and The Grand Tour that they will have much less fun in the future when they will be old enough to drive.
Thorsten Peters, group sales director for Penox Group reflects a year that has been challenging for its lead oxide business but successful with its battery additives.
Thorsten Peters
Penox Group
For PENOX Group, as for most companies, 2020 has been a very challenging and difficult year. The firm was particularly hit by a massive volume reduction on lead oxides in the second quarter, a slow recovery in Q3 and almost back-tonormal business conditions in Q4.
To balance out the negative side of the lead oxide business, PENOX has had a very successful year 2020 with battery additives!
On both our 4BS microsulphate TBLS+ but also on PENOX expander mixes, our customers portfolio grew well thanks to the quality of our products and services, achieving even better sales in terms of volume than in 2019.
During the second quarter of the year our PENOX team worldwide — Germany, Spain, Mexico and Korea — were able to control expenses, reduce working capital, avoid any Covid-19 cases and still maintain high level of flexibility and responsiveness to any potential turnaround in the market.
In Q4 PENOX was able to gear up capacities to satisfy additional demands and will finish 2020 about 20% to 25% below 2019.
Despite a severe control on operating costs, PENOX continued its strategy of investing further in our R&D department in Germany with state-of-the-art testing devices and new production equipment.
We completed our competent team of battery experts in order to provide our customers new additives enhancing significantly the performance of current lead acid batteries and allowing for significant active mass savings.
PENOX continues to believe in massive growth in demand for energy storage and the evolution of automotive industry requirements. Lead acid battery technology still has a great future but the industry has to develop the next generation of lead batteries having greater performance and longer lifetime, still with full recyclability and economic competitiveness.
With our customized expanders, our full range of red lead grades, our TBLS+ with its micronized 4BS seeds and the entire product mixes PENOX can supply you, PENOX is the innovative partner you look for to improve the performance of your battery and make it more competitive!
Charge your battery with PENOX materials!
