Saturday April 23 2016
Reprinted from
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One Clegg brother was forced to walk the
plank, but the other is busy reinventing it
Accsys has almost all
areas of the building
trade in its sights with
its revolutionary wood,
reports Robert Lea
I
t should be a recipe for success.
Take something unique, find
customers who want it, win over
at least part of the addressable
market and you prosper.
In 2010, Nick Clegg took some
repackaged intellectual property of
old-fashioned British liberalism with a
half-measure of social democracy and
sold it to a nation fed up with Labour
and Tory. He won 23 per cent of the
vote, helped to form a coalition and
became the first Liberal leader in
power in nearly a century. Then, well,
everybody knows what happened
then.
In 2009, Paul Clegg took over at a
company whose unique IP is the
chemistry to transform pinewood into
the sort of hardwood that won’t warp
and will last much of a lifetime. With
wood aesthetically and architecturally
desirable again, not only in the
demand for sash windows and solid
front doors, the market is huge.
Quite where it all ends up for
Accsys with its accoya wood
technology and its chief executive,
Clegg the elder — for, yes, this is the
former deputy prime minister’s older
brother — is a story whose chapters
are yet to be written.
Accsys Technologies is a
£60 million company swimming with
the minnows on the London stock
market, all of which have a story to
tell. In Paul Clegg’s case, it is one of
tree-hugging evangelism. Literally.
“From an emotional point of view, I
am one of those people who fondles
trees,” he says. “I love wood. I find it
an incredibly appealing material. You
can walk through a beautiful forest
and that is your raw material.
Compare that to walking through a
bauxite plant or a PVC facility. We are
evangelistic about this, but we have to
be.”
The industrial story is one of a
forgotten technology, a long-agodiscovered chemical process that
hung around labs in academia and
R&D outposts of big multinationals,
the likes of BP and Saint-Gobain,
never quite making it to
commercialisation, never quite
winning patronage.
Accsys, which has had ownership of
the IP since 2003, has found the
alchemy, a cost-effective process to
turn base timber into best-in-class
high-performance wood and do it
profitably. Yet it has done this just as
the construction industry slumped
into its longest and deepest trough for
more than a generation.
Acetylation is the chemical process.
It’s used in textiles or in turning pulp
paper into plastics, glass, paper or
cigarette filters. “Work has been done
on this since the 1950s. It has been
known for a long time that if you
could acetylate wood, it would be a
big contributor to the construction
industry.”
Accsys takes acetic anhydride to
significantly enhance the amount of
acetyl molecules in wood in a process
that is heavily IP protected. It
amounts to taking 50 tonnes of wood,
a large tonnage of chemicals and a
large amount of pressure vacuum and
Paul Clegg has left the politics and high public profile to his brother Nick, but is evangelistic about the potential of Accsys Technologies’ treated wood products
Q&A
Who, or what, is your
mentor?
The moto Festina Lente
(make haste slowly)
Does money
motivate you?
Not fundamentally
What was the
most important
event in your
working life?
The effective
restructuring and turning
around of Accsys
Which person do you most
admire? Bill Gates
What is your favourite
television programme?
The Night Manager
What does leadership
mean to you?
Strategic oversight ,
hiring bright people
and then effective
delegation
How do you
relax?
Family, home,
m
music
and sport
heat. Get the recipe wrong and you
destroy the natural fibres. Get it right
and you have the fibrous strength of
the sort of 200-year-old tropical
hardwood trees that it is now often
illegal to harvest.
This accoya, as it is branded, does
not shrink nor swell in a useful life of
50 years or more, Accsys claims. The
byproduct, acetic acid, is recycled
back into acetic anhydride and reused in a no-waste, greencredentialed, closed-loop process.
For those without a BSc, the
approach is not unrelated to boiling
or soaking the fruit of the horse
chestnut to produce championshipwinning conkers. “That’s about right
from a chemistry point of view, but it
is better to think of it in terms of steel
and galvanised steel, taking a lowerperforming material and producing a
much higher-performing one,” Mr
Clegg says.
The wood, though, is more than
11,000 miles away in New Zealand. In
CV
Born: May 11, 1960
Educated: Bryanston
School, Dorset (1973-77)
Career: 1981-83: First
Boston Corporation;
1983-85: David Allsop
and Partner; 1985-87:
partner, Conning
International;
1987-90: director, James
Capel/Sanford Bernstein;
1990-2000: director,
harvestable terms, the radiata pine
grows at twice the rate of bamboo,
adding 30 cubic metres per hectare
per year, producing a thickness of tree
that allows the multiple cuts that are
required by joiners, the immediate
customers of Accsys.
Isn’t this environmentally bonkers?
“Shipping a cubic metre of wood from
New Zealand has the same carbon
footprint as trucking it 300
kilometres. If we were sourcing it
from within Europe, we would be
trucking it. A slow boat from New
Zealand is both practical and
sustainable.”
Accoya is being used in up to
400,000 windows and doors a year. It
is more expensive to buy that normal
wood, but Accsys argues that it is
cheaper over the whole life of a
windowframe that most homeowners
will never have to replace. Last year’s
revenues of €15 million at Accsys have
been growing this year at a rate of
about 50 per cent. The volumes Mr
Schroder Wertheim;
2000-08: SG Cowen,
latterly chief executive of
Cowen International;
2008-present: Accsys
Technologies, initially as a
non-executive director and
then from 2009 as chief
executive
Other interests:
non-executive directorships
of Synairgen and Peel
Hunt
Family: Married to Susie,
with four children,
Isabella 25, Eloisa 23, Hugh
20, Tom 16
Clegg thinks Accsys can hit over the
next two decades are one million
cubic metres of acetylated wood a
year. At the moment it produces
40,000 cubic metres.
To date, Accsys has been producing
accoya from a facility in the
Netherlands, the legacy of Dutch
government support from back in the
1980s. Its Arnhem plant is doubling in
capacity, but thereafter expansion,
Brexit or no Brexit, will be in Britain.
The company is repeating its
trickery on wood pulp to create
super-resilient, best-in-class MDF.
For this, which it calls tricoya, Accsys
has formed a consortium including
BP that will involve the construction
of a new facility, likely located close to
BP’s chemicals plant on the Humber.
Quite how Mr Clegg got here here
is another journey. After leaving
Bryanston, the elite boarding school,
with no plan to go to university, he
bummed around skiing before going
into the City, where his father had
made his career. After nearly three
decades in the Square Mile, he was
drafted in when Accsys was looking
into the abyss during the worst of the
global financial crisis.
What made an investment banker
think he could become an
industrialist? “I had been in the
finance world since 1981. What
attracted me was a protected
technology that was a potential game
changer in a very large market. If we
could capture only a small
percentage, we would make a
significant impact. It was an unusual
set of circumstances.
“My confidence was in my
judgment. My life in the City had
exposed me to an awful lot of
different business and management
styles. Cumulative time spent with
managements, mostly in growth
businesses, lets you understand what
looks right and what looks wrong.”
And to borrow someone else’s
phrase, it was time for this investment
banker to do something socially
useful. “It was absolutely the case.
Doing something socially positive is
very energising. Rescuing a company,
securing employment, developing
technology is very satisfying and with
a product like this, is very appealing.”
From a cosmopolitan family of
liberals, Mr Clegg says he never had
any inclination to go into politics. “I
don’t think I have the ability for that
at all. I see how difficult it is, how
rough it can be.
“I have great admiration for my
younger brother. What Nick did was
pretty intense. It has been an
emotional rollercoaster for a family
that is as close as we are. I am very
lucky to be working in something that
I am equally passionate about.”
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