MIOX Ramps Up International Sales
New Mexico Business Weekly
MIOX ramps up international sales
March 7, 2008, New Mexico Business Weekly
By Kevin Robinson Avila
When the sprawling, $1.5 billion City of Dreams casino opens in Macau on China’s south coast in late 2008, a bit of New Mexico will course through its veins.
Albuquerque-based MIOX Corp. will install eight industrial water purifiers at the complex—a gambler’s paradise built on a lagoon with a 420,000-square-foot underwater gaming center, 85,000 square feet of retail space, and three luxury hotels. The purifiers will treat everything from pools and spas to drinking water, said MIOX CEO Carlos Perea.
“Macau is the Monte Carlo of Asia,” he said. “The contractors chose us over all competitors for the City of Dreams. It’s a very visible, high-scale project that reflects the headway we’re making in Asian markets.”
Indeed, MIOX is making major inroads overseas, with particularly strong thrusts into the Asian and Latin American regions. International sales accounted for 31 percent of MIOX’s total sales in 2007, up from just 15 percent in 2006, Perea said.
“In the fourth quarter of 2007, international sales reached 44 percent,” he said. “Our goal this year is to increase overseas sales by 100 percent, and we’re on track to do it.”
The company is opening a regional office in Hong Kong, where it sold about 100 systems, Perea said. The new office will manage sales in Taiwan, the Philippines and other Asian markets.
The City of Dreams contract will help build regional name recognition as sales in Asia gain momentum, said Katie Bolek Rich, director of marketing.
“It gives us extended visibility and offers us a very high-profile reference customer,” Bolek said. “We gain a lot more credibility with big guys like this on board.”
The company opened an office in Colombia last year to increase sales there and in other Latin American countries.
“We started aggressively marketing in Mexico, Colombia and elsewhere last year,” Perea said. “We’re finding a very receptive market.”
Mexico-based FEMSA—Coca Cola’s bottling partner for Latin America and the largest integrated beverage maker in the region—uses MIOX water purifiers in Mexico and Colombia and might soon install them at facilities in other countries.
Colombia’s national government is interested in MIOX technology and will host a joint event with public officials and businesspeople in Bogota in late March to discuss the firm’s technology, Perea said. Municipal and state governments in that country, and in Mexico and Puerto Rico, are also discussing pilot projects to showcase MIOX’s water purifiers.
Interest in developing countries is growing because MIOX technology helps offset expensive investments in water-treatment infrastructure.
The company offers an environmentally friendly, low-cost purification method. It uses a simple mix of water and salt shot with an electric current. The electric mix helps separate salt into its component parts—sodium and chloride. The resulting oxidant solution is poured into water where the chloride destroys common pathogens.
The company sells a wide number of products that range from handheld, pen-size purifiers for outdoors types and soldiers to industrial machines that treat water in factories and municipalities, including Albuquerque’s Cottonwood and Paradise Hills areas on the Westside. It builds its systems at a 64,000-square-foot facility near Albuquerque’s Balloon Fiesta Park.
MIOX has received more than $30 million in venture capital, including a $14.5 million investment in January 2007. The latest round helped the company ramp up international sales, with six new marketing people joining the company since July and more hires scheduled for this year. The work force has grown from 55 in early 2007 to 70 now.
The next big marketing thrust could target Eastern Europe, where countries are scrambling to modernize infrastructure as they work to integrate into the European Union, Bolek said. MIOX just made its first sale in Romania this year, where the federal government is using MIOX systems to treat contaminated water in the River Bega.
Kim Sanchez Rael, general partner at Flywheel Ventures—a lead investor in MIOX—said the company is riding a new tide of global investment in clean energy and water.
“New mega trends in energy and water technology are fundamentally changing investment strategies and capital markets,” Sanchez Rael said. “MIOX is very well positioned to take advantage of those trends.”
krobinson-avila@bizjournals.com | 348-8302
All contents of this site © American City Business Journals Inc. All rights reserved.
http://albuquerque.bizjournals.com/albuquerque/stories/2008/03/10/story2.html?b=1205121600%5E1601621