Helios Group and its owner Kansai Paint were celebrating the anniversaries - 100 years of Kansai Paint, 110 years of Helios Resins and 70 years of Belinka.
Such important milestones are the opportunity to remember the past, celebrate the achievements and to look into the future. For the future of the company, understanding trends, development of state of the art coatings and new investments are significant. New resins reactor will replace the old reactor for solvent-based resins with the aim to produce the most sophisticated waterborne resins. One of the Helios most important recent investments is amounted to over €3 million. With the modern facility that allows bigger capacity, the total annual capacity of resins in Helios Group will increase from 60.000 tons to 64.000 tons.
Hubert Culik, CEO of Helios Group: "The success of Helios Group results in decades of knowledge in the field of coatings and our perspectives on the latest global developments and trends. 100 years of Kansai Paint, 110 years of Helios Resins and 70 years of Belinka are numbers that express know-how, quality and tradition in coating industry, along with new strengths, synergies and higher customer orientation. Visionaries founded all these companies. Katsujiro Iwai, who pursued unique business philosophy that is even today deeply rooted in Kansai, founded Kansai Paint. On the other side Helios developed from the company of Ljudevit Marx who established a paint factory with just a few people. The company grew to be among world's leading paint and coatings producers today. Now, we are on the position to carry this responsibility and to be the visionaries for the future."
The production of resins supplemented with the new reactor
Investment in a resin reactor was worth more than €3 million. It will increase the production capacity of waterborne resins for 4.000 tons per year. In May, the construction works on the new reactor were finished and it is expected that the production of waterborne resins will start in July. Water-based resins are the basic component of water-based coatings, so with the additional reactor Helios will also increase the volume of environmentally friendly coatings.
The history of Helios resins began 110 years ago at the location of Color factory in Medvode. At that time seed oil was pressed and then further processed, a procedure that was a precursor to today's production of alkyd resins. With the foundation of the Ljudevit Marx Company in 1924, the production of resins also started in Količevo. 20% of Helios resins are further used in our own production, as coatings consist of resins in 30 to 40%. The rest of the resins are predominantly sold to Western Europe. Besides being the important raw material for coatings, resins are also used for composite products in many other industries, such as nautical, construction, automotive industry and elsewhere.
All reactor lines in Helios are ran by computers, which allows us to fully control the process. With this method, we have enabled repeatability, product quality, maximum optimization and maximum security of the processes. As in other segments, high-level environmental standards are also implemented in resins plant. All production units are connected with the modern central air cleaning station. With the help of state-of-the-art technical solutions, we completely shut down the production process so that there are no releases into the environment.
Helios and Kansai – joint forces for global recognition
With Kansai's acquisition of Helios on April 1st 2017, the two companies with long history joint forces on European market. For Helios, having a strategic owner such as Kansai Pant means opportunities in many different perspectives. David Kubala, CEO of Helios Group: "Our knowledge exchange and cooperation has already brought results in specific areas. We combined the network and services of Helios Group and the knowledge of Kansai Altan from Turkey, in the area of Tier 1 automotive coatings. Our common goal is to supply commercial transport producers with joint products. We are also cooperating with Kansai Altan and Kansai Paint Japan on the further development of E-coat (KTL) segment. In the future, we plan to make a step ahead in every one of our existing segments. As one of the market leaders in railway coatings in Europe, Helios will keep expanding our expertise in that area, with the emphasis on waterborne, environmentally friendly products. Last year we reinforced our powder coatings capacity and we will increase production capacity of waterborne resins with the new resins reactor. We will develop our segment of decorative coatings especially in the project business area and enter the construction market. With our Helios Refinish department, we will offer our clients unique user experiences together with our flexibility and versatile range of products. UV curing coatings will remain in the focus of our industrial wood coatings segment. We are continuously strengthening our locations and timely invests into technologies. That is what it takes to be recognised as a solution company that provides the best quality of the whole set, know-how, technology, product characteristics, application and customer service."