Utilities Membranes Europe

VIDEO: HP Nanda sets out the future strategy for DuPont Water Solutions

Friday, 22 November 2019

Adding more [membrane] tools to the toolkit

DuPont Water Solutions recently made the headlines with two high profile acquisitions.

Kickstarting the company’s investment and growth plan was an agreement to buy the inge ultrafiltration (UF) membrane business from German chemical company, BASF, for an undisclosed sum.

Following this, DuPont then signed an agreement to acquire the Memcor business, including the ultrafiltration and membrane biofiltration technologies from Evoqua Water Technologies.

Discussing the two major acquisitions, HP Nanda, Global VP of DuPont Water Solutions, said: “We have been the global leader in reverse osmosis for a long time, and we have been the leader in ion exchange resin, as well as a small business in ultrafiltration. As we have been looking at the evolving needs of our customers, we realised we needed to broaden our portfolio.”

Nanda said the inge and Memcor acquisitions allowed the company to have “more tools in our toolkit” that will enable us to go and solve our customers’ problems better.

Creating smarter membranes

Discussing how he thinks membrane technology will develop more broadly, Nanda said: “We keep hearing about ‘Industry 4.0’ – almost every industry is undergoing a digital revolution. We think the water space is the same.”

He added: “You keep hearing about smart metering to make water smarter and so we are going to figure out how to use technology and deploy products so they can help our customers' [membranes] require less cleaning, fewer chemicals, require less replacement and offer it at a high level of reliability and performance. This is so that the overall ecosystem is much more efficient through technology.”

The interview is the final instalment in a three-part thought leadership series, with Alexander Lane, commercial director, kickstarting the videos by addressing the history of the Dow-DuPont merger and demerger.