1. Cleangas ist a partner of ASCO and carries out service visits at customers in Germany. What do you see as the advantages for both sides?
In my opinion, the biggest advantage has the customer. We are geographically located in the middle of Germany and therefore have short distances to nationwide service missions. This saves time and money. Our rolling repair shops are equipped with all relevant spare parts and special tools, so we can meet almost all service requirements on site. In addition, we have a large repair shop area for more comprehensive or not directly localizable service work. After successful service, the machines are put through their paces here in a long-term test. This ensures maximum service reliability, especially for pelletizers. On request, identical rental machines can also made available here for longer periods of service.
The advantage for us as a service partner is that we have an extensive but easy to manage spare parts stock. Equally important is the permanent use of our trained service staff and our service vehicles, which were previously only available for our own operated systems.
With CLEANGAS, ASCO has a service partner who can react quickly to necessary service calls with its own spare parts warehouse and has a high degree of service experience, especially in the field of pelletizers. Due to the long-term tests (4-6 hour dry ice production) and the rental machines by CLEANGAS, ASCO can offer its customers a maximum service with highest quality.
2. Cleangas, like ASCO, rents pelletizers to its customers. who are your main customers and what's the future trend?
Renting is not quite the right term here. We offer to major customers two different models: Our main model is aimed at customers with an annual requirement of more than 150 tons of dry ice. Here we provide tanks, ASCO pelletizers, CRYOBOXX boxes, raw gas (LCO2) and all spare parts and service work. We do not charge any rent for this, but the customer only pays the previously agreed dry ice price for the finished kilogram or ton. Just as if he is buying electricity!
As an alternative, we offer an operating hour model consisting of ASCO pelletizer including all spare parts and service work with and without CRYOBOXX Boxes. Here only the actual operating hours are charged. Tank and liquid supply are the responsibility of the customer. This system usually comes into play when a CO2 tank and product for other areas such as cooling, stunning or welding are already at the customer's site.
In both cases the customer can make an exact unit cost calculation without any "soft costs". This is especially in demand and necessary in the industrial sector with high quantities.
In our opinion, both systems are economically and ecologically unbeatable, since storage and transport sublimation, quantity redundancy and often lacking freshness are part of the past. A high degree of supply security is guaranteed by preventive maintenance with replacement of the relevant wear parts. And should a machine really fail, our short distances with fast reaction times and exchange machines, which can be rented conventionally, come into play.
Our main customers so far come from a wide range of industrial sectors and food processing. In the future, we see a lot of potential in the area of online shipping, where the main focus is on packaged dry ice products. Here, our dry ice box program plays an important, complementary role.
3. Cleangas ist the largest dry ice online retailer in Germany. How does the dry ice demand develop during Corona?
We were able to make identical observations in our "dry ice direct stores" in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The shipping of temperature-controlled food via online is increasing during Corona, but certainly not only because of this. However, all events and festivals in 2020 have been cancelled and most of the gastronomy have had to close down in spring and at the end of the year. These sales cannot be offset by the additional online shipping. The other areas were stable, with the exception of the lockdown periods. The bottom line, however, remains a small minus this year.
4. Do you prepare for the Corona vaccine - how are you currently planning?
This is difficult to answer. In the medium term, I do not see any areas of application for the parcel sector, since the vaccination is to be carried out via vaccination centers with a high demand and high safety requirements, at least for the first year. In addition, there will not be the one CORONA vaccine that has to be transported and stored between -60° C and -80° C, but other active ingredients with only a low cooling requirement profile. Nevertheless, dry ice will certainly be needed and there will be no alternative in some cases. Therefore, there will be regional possibilities for dry ice supply, where a temperature-controlled active ingredient is produced or also stored or temporarily stored. The demand or sales of dry ice cannot be planned and we do not really calculate with it, but we could react quickly due to our machine capacity of 3 to/h.
We see more possibilities for our dry ice box program CRYOBOXX, as there will be an additional demand for dry ice boxes worldwide due to the necessary cooling chains. We manufacture the boxes completely in-house, i.e. Made in Germany, based on the requirement profile of a dry ice producer.
Caption: Cleangas Company from above | Caption: Logo Cleangas | Caption: Thomas ten Eiken |