Nashville Post
The machines made by rec
ently relocated Avure range in size from a tabletop to hundreds of tons
Avure Technologies made local headlines last summer when it announced the relocation of its headquarters to Cool Springs from Seattle. The company designs, makes and services equipment that allows manufacturers — from aerospace and energy companies to makers of orthopedic implants — to process products with extremely high pressure. Pat Adams, Avure’s president and CEO, says his company’s clients “place their products inside an Avure system and change the functional properties by applying massive pressure or a combination of pressure and heat.”
In a conversation with the Post’s Walker Duncan, Adams also said Avure — which topped $100 million in revenues for the first time in 2008 — booked a record number of contracts in 2011. Up next: Setting up local assembly operations and selling machines to more end markets.
Tell us about Avure’s technologies beyond your core industrial clients.
Over the past few years, we commercialized the first major advancement in food preservation and safety with the introduction of high-pressure processing, commonly known as HPP. HPP is utilized for hundreds of products, such as sliced deli meats, fresh guacamole, salsas, wet salads, and, most recently, healthy beverages and ground meats. It enables these products to remain fresh longer without requiring chemical preservatives; a few minutes of HPP kills E.coli, salmonella, listeria and most other common disease organisms while allowing the freshness to be extended.
All of this grew out of the company’s producing the first synthetic diamonds for use in industrial cutting tools in 1953. We have expanded the use of pressure — the second fundamental force of nature — to make materials stronger, lighter or healthier than can be achieved by any other methods.
And your business is based on “orphaned” technology, right?
Our founders used the technology for their own purposes in the early years, including a joint venture with DeBeers to produce diamonds. We sold our first external machine in 1965, a system that still operates today. By the 1990s, the company was part of a large Scandinavian conglomerate that was not really interested in this niche technology due to its small size. It was sold to a Seattle-based company for its potential for food processing in 1999, but the other product lines were considered “mature technologies” with no potential for growth.
In October 2005, with the support of the Gores Group, a private-equity fund, we separated into a stand-alone company and for the first time had the opportunity to focus on Avure’s core technology. We hired executives who had enjoyed success in much larger companies and who had the desire for hands-on management.
We implemented effective sales and marketing programs, designed systems that were larger than anyone had ever thought possible, and catalyzed interest in niche markets globally to create excitement. While the company had been selling into China, Russia, and other countries around the world for decades, we exploited our global footprint by expanding our sales channels and leveraging non-conventional marketing techniques to drive interest and prospects to us via electronic media.
The company was acquired by Milestone Partners in April 2009 with the intention to come out of the global downturn as an even stronger, better-focused organization.
Describe the machines themselves to give folks an idea of how big they are.
We produce laboratory-scale systems for research labs and universities around the world that are small enough to fit on a countertop. At the other end of the spectrum, our largest operating system required two 550-ton cranes to install (in Japan), with the processing cylinder weighing 110 tons and the support frame over 160 tons.
In most cases, our customers build new buildings to house our equipment. We are currently installing an even larger system in the U.S.A. and have the largest we’ve ever built under construction in our workshop.
Our HPP food systems are compact units that in many cases are installed side by side as the customer’s product demand grows and additional HPP capacity is needed. The HPP systems range from a self-contained development system that is 12 feet by 12 feet to commercial units that are 46 feet long, 11.8 feet wide and 6.9 feet high, including the material handling systems. These units weigh over 50 tons and can operate 24/7 at pressure of about 87,000 pounds per square inch.
What drew you to Nashville and how you have found the town thus far?
Avure’s corporate office was in the Seattle area, our main design and production in Sweden, and a small plant in Columbus for our specialty products. We needed to move HQ east to reduce the nine-hour time difference with Sweden and to consolidate our executive management that was not located in Seattle.
We narrowed our search to the Midwest and Southeast. We refined our search to three cities after evaluating tax structures, cost of living and quality of life. After my first contact with the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce, we were awed by the interest in Avure and the effort to recruit us. I believe we received attention almost equivalent to Jackson National Life, yet we were not anywhere near their size.
What kind of growth do you expect to see both locally and worldwide?
We are impacted by the global economy, including the financial crisis in Europe and the cash issues in Russia. Yet with our global footprint and the expanding demand for our technology, we see sustainable double-digit growth in each of our product lines.
One of the mantras of building a $1 billion business is “Divide, divide, divide.” We have reached the critical mass in our product lines where it is time to organize by applications. Our first step is to create two divisions: an industrial products division for our isostatic, metal forming and specialty product lines; and a food division for our HPP products.
Our Vasteras, Sweden, office will be the headquarters for the industrial division and our Franklin office will be the HQ for our food division. We have decided to add engineering, supply chain, production and service staff locally and are recruiting for a number of these positions. We will finalize a site selection for production in the next few weeks and expect to be assembling food systems in the Nashville area by year’s end.
Any new technologies you can tell us about?
Avure has the exclusive rights to two new applications we will soon be introducing that can have significant benefits in the protein industry. We have developed a new method in isostatic processing that will give producers in transportation, aerospace and energy markets cost-effective access to our technology for parts they have not previously been able to process with high pressure. Our development pipeline is robust and “divisionalizing” the company will allow better focus for the benefit of our customers and products.