Focus on customer and environment

Tikkurila has millions of satisfied paint users including consumers, professional painters and industrial customers. They are accustomed to use our products and services in the market area we are actively operating in. That is why they are also familiar with our main brands; consumers and professional painters know well brands like Tikkurila, Alcro, Beckers, Teks or Vivacolor. Industrial customers recognize the Tikkurila Coatings brand, offering high quality and reliable products and services. Close co-operation with customers enables us to develop environmentally compliant, user friendly products, as well as build services to meet their needs also in the future.

Tikkurila is a paint manufacturing and marketing company with traditions and experience, the company has been established in 1862 in Vantaa, Finland, where the headquarters is still located. During the last two decades the company has actively expanded its geographical presence; and is nowadays having production units in seven countries and sales offices in further eleven. This has resulted in € 648 million revenue in 2008 and EBIT of € 59 million.

Service via distribution network
Distribution plays very important role when talking about product availability and services for customers located in several countries. Efficiency in supply chain is based on our manufacturing philosophy of producing base paints in big batches in our factories combined with local tinting at point-of-sales. This also enables excellent customer service; the distributor can offer more than 10 000 different colours for customer from traditional to new modern metallic colours and pearlescent effects. And it takes less than five minutes to produce the colour for the customer. To be able to serve all the customers we have more than 5000 retail outlets in 40 countries offering our products with good service. Continuous training of our distributors is a vital element for keeping up high customer satisfaction; and training is the matter that also strengthens our co-operation with distributors.

We have developed distribution concept even further for our industrial customers which have more demands for product availability and customer service. Our service and distribution network for them is known with a brand name Temaspeed. Temaspeed distributors are dedicated to offer the best service as well as fast and reliable deliveries for industrial paint users. They help and support industrial customers in everything related to painting process; selecting correct paint or paint system, choosing and knowing about colours, even if it is about coloured primers, aerosols or stains, delivering correct amount of each shade, issues related to safety and environment, economy of painting process... or you name it! This exceptional service enables our industrial customers to concentrate in their core business.

The Temaspeed concept is continuing its strong performance in sales during the last four years. This unique service is today available in 30 countries and more are to follow.

R&D – new innovative solutions
The driving forces for our R&D have been user friendliness and the Installation and Product VOC Directives. Our main focus has been in high-solids and water-borne paint technologies in order to help our customers to meet the requirements set up in these directives. Beside environmental aspects we always take the cost efficiency of our customers’ processes into account. This could mean shorter over coating time between paint layers or reduced number of layers in the protective paint system. Especially new high-solids products have enabled us to reduce the number of paint layers without sacrificing the corrosion protection performance.
UV-curing technology is one of focus areas in wood industrial coatings. We have made a breakthrough in UV curing area by developing patented UVITEC drying device based on UV led technology suitable both for three and two dimensional objects. This invention has got a special award from RadTech Europe Association. The UVITEC offers many benefits for customers e.g. energy savings, better surface quality and lower curing temperature.

Harmony with environment
Environmental awareness is an increasing trend among our customers including in both consumers and industrial paint users. Environmental issues have always been very important for us as our main factory is located in the middle of the city Vantaa in Finland. We have always had a strong focus on environmentally compliant and user friendly products and wanted to be ahead of legislation. The latest example of success in this area is the granting of the Nordic Ecolabel known as "the Swan" to our Swedish subsidiary Alcro-Beckers for its exterior paints. This recognition is in line with Tikkurila's long-term environmental focus, which aims at developing paints with the smallest possible impact on the environment.
Niklas Frisk, the Managing Director of Alcro-Beckers confirms: "Being the first to be granted the Nordic Ecolabel for exterior paints is proof that our environmental focus is producing concrete results. Our target is to continuously develop high-quality paints with a minimal environmental impact.”

Our Industrial Coatings Business Unit has also a strong focus on water-borne products to fulfil the customer needs in wood and metal industry. We offer totally water-borne 2-component paint system for C4 corrosivity category that is fully cured in 8 hours with the help of our Dry Tech technology. This technology has been used by ABB Transformers in Sweden for several years with a plan to start using this tested paint system in many of their other locations around the world. It is obvious that this technology is very interesting for other companies who have needs for more environmental and cost efficient solutions.

Services for customer's success
As our customer base is very wide and consisting of consumers, painting professionals, architects and engineers as well as industrial paint users we offer vast range of services for them. The importance of internet is increasing all the time and we have built up customer specific web sites for the needs of each customer category. Our customers can find on our web site more specific information about products, colours, pre-treatment and application; educational videos and tools for calculating costs and VOC emissions.

An additional service to our customers are call centers or technical service centers, which offer help to consumers in choosing correct paints and tools or any other question related to painting. In Finland we get annually tens of thousands of calls from satisfied consumers.
We have also established tailor- made services to assist architects and engineers in preparing paint specifications for demanding projects and to offer consultancy for their technical requests. Training is an important part of our service offer for architects and engineers. Our dedicated Technical Service team helps our industrial customers in optimizing their paint process, in trial paintings at customers’ line as well as offers consultancy in pre-treatment, paint specifications and VOC emissions.

Take the challenge and contact us or any of our distributors - we are willing to help and serve you.