High-tech paints

“Andrei Adamovich, most of the Factory of Protective and Decorative Finishes’ output is designed by your specialists from scratch and has no direct peers in Russia or worldwide. What enables your company to be successful at developing innovative products and technologies, while most RFE manufacturers set a much more modest goal of ‘survival’ in a challenging economy?”

“On the one hand, the harsh local climate - high humidity, strong winds and wild temperature swings - raises the bar for designers of paints and lacquers, making deep-infiltration paints and lacquers with special properties especially useful for the RFE. High utility and transportation charges in the RFE make it practically impossible for local products to compete successfully with Western substitutes on price, so the ability to design and produce high value-added innovative products is essential for surviving, prospering, and expanding in this market.

“Some of our products are designed from scratch, while others are substantial improvements on domestic designs late from the 1980. Some of our products result from our cooperation with Germany’s Bayer, which creates polymers and other materials we use to develop our final products at our lab.”

“Can you tell us what’s special about your products? In what ways are they innovative?”

“Our company is the largest RFE producer of water-dispersion (polymeric phosphate) paints and lacquers and dry modified construction mixes for various purposes. All our products are designed to provide comprehensive solutions for our customers to address the needs of modern, high-quality and at the same time lower-cost construction.

“Our core products include anti-corrosive, exterior and interior paints, polymeric waterproof compositions, polymeric and anti-frost additives for concrete, special fire and vandalism prevention coatings, and many others - 55 product types in all, many of which are innovative and some of which are better than similar overseas products.

“The main focus of our innovation lies in special technical properties. Chemical interaction between paint components and elements of the base or primer serves to enhance elasticity, tensile strength and resistance of coatings to various atmospheric effects; additionally, the useful properties of our products remain at the original strong level for more than 10 years.

“Our specialists’ efforts ensure that our products are environmentally friendly and fire-resistant. Paints and lacquers with these properties are more expensive than conventional organic finishes, but our products’ perfect zero toxicity makes it possible to paint premises without shutting down production lines, hospitals or schools.”

“How often do you design and bring new products to the market? What are you working on these days?”

“We expand our range of solutions for construction needs every year. We entered a new market in 2011, when we began producing construction materials out of reinforced polystyrol concrete. Similar to wood in some of its key properties, this material is very strong, light, fire-resistant and environmentally friendly, while the new polystyrol concrete composition designed at our lab has made it possible to improve all its key properties to a level far above that of comparable products. We presented it at a trade show in Japan where our new material got a lot of positive feedback.

“We launched production of nano-modified products in 2011, which has enabled us to significantly increase some of the key useful measurable properties of our products.”

“Which of the large RFE construction projects are using your products?”

“The company’s products are finding broader applications every year and have been used successfully in many top-priority construction projects for the APEC Summit in Primorsky Region, as well as in facilities for the International Sports Games ‘Children of Asia’ in Yakutia, which is famous for extremely harsh and cold winters.”  

By Gleb ALENISHKO.