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When a municipality or other government entity builds a water or wastewater treatment plant, often the equipment or products inside the plant are manufactured or supplied by Parkson Corp. It is the company’s technological innovation that has kept it prospering for more than 50 years.

“The philosophy at Parkson has always been to try to introduce advancements in the technology as opposed to manufacturing relatively accepted, generic equipment,” emphasizes Michael Miller, vice president and general manager of North American municipal business. “For example, the first product Parkson introduced was the Lamella Gravity Settler. ‘Lamella’ is now used like the word ‘Kleenex.’

“When we introduced incline plate separator technology in 1970, we had to convince the market that round or rectangular clarifiers were not the only way to go,” he continues. “The Lamella Gravity Settler reduced the space envelope by a factor of 10. We occupy 1/10 of the land area that a conventional clarifier would do, and that was a totally different way of looking at the market.”

Still 18 Holes

The water or wastewater treatment system used can dramatically affect the size and type of facility that must be built. One example is a drinking water plant in Cincinnati that was one of the first to use gravity settler technology in the 1970s, and it is still operating, Miller says.

“Where the clarifiers needed to be located was close to a municipal golf course,” he relates. “Conventional clarifiers would have had to eliminate two of the holes on the golf course. But with gravity settlers, we could put the units in and the golf course was untouched.”

Parkson continued its innovation with the DynaSand sand filter, and the company is now the world’s largest seller of continuous backwash sand filters, which eliminate backwashing pumps or storage tanks. “Now, continuous backwashing is a standard choice that operators use,” Miller maintains. “Nobody even thinks twice about it. About 50 to 60 people manufacture them around the world, but we were the first to introduce it.”

No Commodities

The company does not concentrate on the commodities end of the market. “Our philosophy has always been to introduce new technology, new ways of doing things, even if that means a smaller overall market niche to play in as opposed to playing in the full spectrum,” Miller emphasizes. Parkson’s avoidance of commodities is due to the low margins they carry. Instead, it replenishes its product pipeline with new technology.

“We’ve been very successful throughout our history of locating technology around the world, importing it in the U.S. and successfully launching it,” Miller maintains. “We’re on a never-ending quest of locating or developing new technology on our own and introducing it to the market. Our success does not rest on one or two product lines.” If it did, the company would be adversely affected if a new competitor’s products threatened its own.

Marketing Savvy

Sometimes, a technology developed by a smaller company may have been in the world market for four or five years before Parkson obtains exclusive distribution rights to it. “It’s not that they were new – they’ve been around for four to six years,” Miller insists. “We have taken them and really introduced them to the marketplace. That is where Parkson excels – identifying technologies from around the world and successfully introducing them to the U.S. market. We are not particularly well-known as being an R&D company – we are very adroit at identifying existing technology that people really don’t know how to commercialize and bringing it to the marketplace.”

The ways in which Parkson obtains that technology vary. Sometimes it’s an outright acquisition. “More often than not, it’s a license agreement, sometimes an exclusive distributorship, sometimes it’s a partnership,” Miller lists. “We are not fixed to any one model but would much rather get involved with the start-up company, keeping the key technical people involved for some protracted period until that technology has been fully assimilated into Parkson.”

Wastewater Business

Miller estimates approximately 80 to 85 percent of the company’s business is products for wastewater treatment and the rest is for water treatment. He says it is difficult to calculate a market share for the company because it competes in so many different areas.

“Measuring market share is very difficult to even begin to describe because you are talking about the overall market, which includes all the civil works, construction, operating arms, chemicals – it’s massive,” Miller stresses. “Even if you talk about equipment, you’re talking about pumps, valves and pipes – a totally different segment than we play in. Market share is almost impossible for anybody to have any true meaning for any two companies because everybody looks at it differently. The overall industry is tens of billions of dollars. There’s no way to break it down to smaller, bite-size segments.”

Such a calculation also is complicated by the lack of published data from so many of the relatively small, privately held companies that historically have made up the market, although Miller concedes that is changing with large companies like General Electric, Siemens and ITT buying up and consolidating smaller companies in the industry over the last 10 to 12 years.

Industrial vs. Municipal

Parkson started as a 100 percent industrial water and wastewater treatment company, but over the last 50 years, the municipal market has accounted for approximately 75 to 80 percent of the company’s business and continues to do so, Miller calculates. Although funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) contributed to many municipal water and wastewater projects, the stimulus on Parkson’s business is not continuing.

“What it did was it compressed the market,” Miller reports. “In 2010, we had a record year - 2011 will not be a record. Our revenue will be lower this year, and really what the stimulus did was pull work from 2011 into 2010. New projects were not created. There’s not enough time for new projects to be created because the gestation period from the engineering phase goes from 18 to 30 months typically once a project is approved up to the bid. So there wasn’t enough time to generate new projects.”

ARRA essentially pulled projects that would have been built in late 2010 and the first half of 2011 into the first half of 2010 and the last half of 2009 to qualify for the stimulus money. “It compressed everything into a much shorter period,” Miller maintains. “The business has not rebounded in 2011. There’s a real dearth of new bidding.

“Our industrial business has bounced back somewhat this year, but it was down markedly over the preceding two years,” he says. Many of Parkson’s products are used in the food processing, metal finishing, chemical processing and pulp and paper industries, which have not fully recovered yet.

New Technology

Parkson subcontracts the manufacturing of its products. All suppliers must meet ISO 9001:2008 certification levels. To overcome slow growth in its historical markets, Parkson Corp. is introducing newer technologies. Among them is fixed-film technology from a partnership with Biowater Technology that gives Parkson exclusive distribution rights for Biowater’s existing and future fixed-film technologies. These biological treatment solutions for wastewater treatment are designed to meet the needs of municipal and industrial clients to minimize energy costs and satisfy rigid environmental standards.

The systems use plastic biomedia carriers to reduce the size of treatment facilities. Parkson also has distribution rights to Biowater’s next generation of biofilm technology that requires 30 to 40 percent less energy.

Another technology new to Parkson is the MaximOS on-site disinfection generating system that was developed by MIOX Corp. The system eliminates chlorine and is powered by electrolytic cell technology that is said to offer greater flexibility and economic savings compared with traditional disinfection.