Japanese companies have great presence in
the water treatment membrane business with a share of about 60% in the world market.
The two leaders are Nitto Denko (32%) and Toray (27%). In recent years, however,
Chinese companies chase Japanese companies at a rapid pace, underselling Japanese
products by 30-50%. With the help of academic-industrial alliance, the Chinese
government is facilitating domestic production of water treatment membranes. In
view of the future growth in the Chinese market, Toray built a plant with a
Chinese company on a joint venture basis in Beijing for the integrated mass production
of reverse osmosis membranes with an investment of 7.5 billion yen. With the
completion of this plant, Toray’s production capacity of reverse osmosis
membranes increased to 1.5 times.
Korea is also chasing. It will invest about
19 billion yen between 2007 and 2012 to substantiate the state-of-the-art
membrane treatment technology. Germany will subsidize the research on water
treatment membrane with a huge investment. To cope successfully with these
companies, Japan has already started projects to advance the membrane treatment
technology to the next stage.
The Meta-ton Water System is participated
by a total of 27 companies and universities including Toray and Tokyo
University. This project aims to establish a seawater desalination system with
a daily capacity of 10 million tons, two times bigger capacity of the current
world’s largest seawater desalination plant in Algeria being constructed by
Hyflux of Korea. With a subsidy of about 3 billion yen from the government, the
Japanese project is trying to halve the desalination cost by dint of osmotic
power that uses condenses seawater, a by-product of desalination. The research
team is trying hard to establish a system that is highest in performance and
lowest in desalination cost. The world water market is estimated at 86 trillion
yen in 2025. The competition will grow intense continuously. (To be continued)
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