For the Hyderabad-based clean room technology solutions company Integrated Cleanroom Technologies (ICLEAN), building safe and secure cleanrooms is one big business opportunity.
Specialising in the area over the years, it has seven manufacturing units which make different components, partitions and specialised cleanroom equipment for the company. Set up in 2002, the firm finds a fit with companies in sectors where the paramount requirement is an environment without a speck of dust or other foreign bodies including airborne microbes, aerosol particles, and chemical vapours.
Cleanrooms exist largely in sectors such as pharmaceuticals, food, defence, electronics and R&D where cleanliness of the highest standard is mandatory.
Sensing the growing opportunity in building customised cleanrooms, not surprisingly, Takasago Thermal Engineering Company Limited (TTE), a Japanese company founded in 1923, last year acquired about 26 per cent stake in ICLEAN.
“Over the years, the practice was to design and develop a room and then treat it with necessary materials and chemicals and ensure that they conform to cleanroom standards. But by making them modular, we have taken the whole process a notch higher and also help set them up much faster,” explains Gopi K, the Managing Director. The association with the Tokyo Stock Exchange listed company is seen to help the company access new technologies for use in Indian companies and companies abroad where TTE offers solutions.
Gopi says powder-coated steel material, stainless steel, pre-coated materials of different constitution and glass re-inforced polymers are used in building the cleanrooms. The heating and cooling systems need to be custom designed to meet the requirements of each plant. The market for cleanrooms in India is estimated to be about Rs 2000 crore and of this, the organised sector accounts for about Rs 500 crore. ICLEAN accounts for over Rs 350 crore of the business, of which 80 per cent comes from the pharma sector.
While there are a number of companies which do bits and pieces of cleanroom technology, ICLEAN brings together design engineering, cleanroom manufacture, equipment supply, project management, installation and commissioning solutions, making it a turnkey project management solutions provider.