Dallas–Flooring Industries, the intellectual property (IP) company of the Unilin Group, (which is owned by Mohawk) has entered into a cooperation agreement with Panchem Industries, the New Zealand company that owns the rights to commercialize the Vitec technology.This patented Vitec technology provides greater water and moisture resistance and increases the strength and fire retardancy of cellulose based substrates such as HDF/MDF, OSB, plywood, and Triboard, by treating them with specific chemicals. Panchem Industries has already built a fully automatic plant in New Zealand to produce MDF and HDF products with the Vitec technology and will now allow other companies to manufacture and sell products using this Vitec technology by using Flooring Industries’ licensing expertise and network.
“We are very pleased to partner up with Flooring Industries”, states Peter Russel, director of Panchem. “We had successfully built a plant in New Zealand, so we were of the opinion that the time was right to have a worldwide introduction of the technology. Since we did not have any interest in setting up manufacturing facilities all over the world ourselves, we believed that licensing out the technology was the best business model for our company. We were therefore immediately interested when we learned that Flooring Industries is not only enforcing and commercializing the well-known clic patents of the Unilin Group, but were also offering their services to companies that had unexploited IP. Partnering up with Flooring Industries was the right thing to do, given their experience and track record in licensing out patented technology.”