Coatings World’s 2019 CEO Forum features executives from 10 coatings companies offering their insights on the industry. This year’s forum includes CEOs  from leading coatings companies from the U.S.,  Europe and Asia. The participants are Henrik Andersen, President and CEO, Hempel Group;  John Falder, CEO, HMG Paints; Boris Gorella, CEO, Beckers Group; Michael H. McGarry, Chairman and CEO, PPG Industries; Abhijit Roy, CEO, Berger Paints; Daniel Llinas Salá, CEO, Titan Lux; Tetsushi Tado, CEO, Nippon Paint; Thierry Vanlancker, CEO, AkzoNobel; Armodios Yannidis, CEO, Vitex.

CW: In what areas are you focusing your R&D efforts? 
Andersen: Our preferred way of working is as our customers’ innovation partner, as this is the best way to add value to our customers and ensure that the solutions we develop are well-suited to the market. This demands that we truly understand a customer’s business, that our entire global organisation works to develop solutions that address the customer’s business needs, and we test and refine these solutions in collaboration with the customer. 
With 15 R&D centerss around the world, our efforts within R&D has a broad focus. Most recently, we opened our new Centre of Excellence in Barcelona. Focused on coatings for passive fire protection, the centre will enable us to further enhance our capabilities, expertise and product offering in what is an increasing important area for our customers. 

Falder: HMG continue to develop into new markets and innovations, in particular we’ve continued to progress our Graphene based coatings into commercial products, expanded our speciality portfolio in general and developed a new range of niche decorative products which have enjoyed fantastic market feedback.  Our R&D team have also been busy with testing and approvals for a number of military and DEF STAN speciation’s that further enhances our portfolio.

Gorella: For a number of years now, Beckers’ R&D focus has been towards making our products always more sustainable and improving them for the benefit of our customers. We have already presented to the market several bio-based products and our expert teams are thoroughly working to enlarge our offering in that segment. 
In the same vein, we will continue developing our range of waterborne paints, not only for industrial coatings, but also for coil coatings, as we forecast the increasingly stringent environmental regulations driving higher demand for such products. Besides, we are also investing considerable time and energy in coatings applied to more sustainable end products such as e-scooters.

McGarry: As a global leader in paints, coatings and specialty materials, PPG remains committed to investing in our R&D efforts to continue to meet and exceed customer needs. Our commitment to innovation is intertwined with growth and sustainability. It covers a wide range of products and services that provide environmental, safety and other benefits to our customers. 
In 2018, we invested nearly $500 million in research and development. Over the last decade, a strategic realignment to focus our product portfolio almost entirely on paints and coatings has driven a concerted, disciplined approach to developing a wide range of innovative products. These products create a compelling business proposition and processes that provide environmental and other sustainability benefits to our customers. Examples of these products include our electrocoat (e-coat) technology for automotive equipment manufacturers (OEM), a light- and heat-reflective “eggplant” coating for the aerospace industry, LIQUID NAILS® FUZE*IT® all-purpose construction adhesive, and more. 

Roy: The efforts of our R&D team are focused on delivering innovative solutions to our customers in the decorative and industrial segments. The Indian consumer is extremely discerning and is always demanding improved value efficiency. Berger is also cognizant of its responsibilities as a corporate citizen and seeks to employ cleaner technologies that our R&D is constantly working on. 

Llinas-Salá: Product performance and sustainability are the two key areas.

Tado: We are offering advanced paints that ensure both environmentally friendliness and cost reductions. For example, Marine segment developed ultra-low fuel consumption antifouling paints for ship bottoms having a water trapping function based on a biomimetic technology. The technology was inspired from the skins of tuna and dolphins to reduce friction.
Also, automotive segment developed ”water based 3 wet coating system” for cars, it aims to achieve cost and time reductions for car manufactures,
In addition, R&D at NIPPON PAINT HD Group aims to lead “innovation” and to develop “core technologies” by offering state-of-art technologies focusing on “environment,” “people’s life” and “paintings.” And we propose various possibilities that paint and coatings can offer by utilizing our innovations to our customers and markets. 

Vanlancker: For AkzoNobel as leader in paints and coatings continuing innovation is key for our success. We are very proud of this years first edition of Paint the Future – the AkzoNobel startup challenge. This is the paints and coatings challenge for startups and scale-ups to win a joint development agreement with AkzoNobel. 

The five challenges are: 
Smart application
How could your solution change or improve the way customers apply our products?
Enhanced functionality
What exciting new functionality can your technology offer to make coatings cleaner, more responsive or adaptive?
Circular solutions
How would your solution enable circular use of materials at any point in our value chain?
Life science infusion
How can your solution, containing bio-active technology, help bring better performance or innovative features to our coatings?
Predictable performance
How can we collect and augment data more innovatively to make predictions for real world surface performance more accurate?

Yannidis: Regarding VITEX, R&D efforts are focused on developing new consumer needs for healthier & safer indoor living environment as well as state of the art outdoor protective coatings with excellent environmental footprint and sustainability characteristics, taking by this way the advantage of our excellent production facilities which are running with net zero energy and zero waste balance!


To read CEO Forum part one click here.