Ann: Fluence June 2019 Quarterly Report Business Update, page-55

@Dungiven

My read on it is that each partner wants separation of manufacturing for their specific Aspiral requirements. At the current factory, any potential customer can arrange a factory tour and have a look around, plus take photos and video. As a large customer like Zhejiang Tiandi or Hunan Kaitian I would not necessarily like competitors that I have no control or visibility over, poking around the factory where my units are being manufactured and assembled. This gives each large customer the ability to have their own dedicated units assembled on site, while giving them some ability to control who goes in to see them. This will also give the individual customers more ability to claim that these are their own provincial manufactured technology for marketing and provincial funding purposes. Important when dealing with provincial leaders to be able to say that the units are manufactured within the province to custom designs. A dedicated site also allows Fluence to promise how many units can be produced for that specific customer, rather than having to balance the need of multiple customers from one site.

That is pretty common in manufacturing. Apple has half of its iPhones produced in Zhengzhou by Foxconn using ARM based chipsets produced by TSMC and Samsung. Foxconn/TSMC/Samsung are rarely referred to by the general public when talking about iPhones. I'd suggest that the Fluence MABR partners want the same. The likes of Zhejiang Tiandi will refer to their provincial sewage as Tiandi village sewage (based on Israli MABR tech), but Fluence do the manufacturing and assembly as they are the technology supplier.

It was an initial request of CGGC that Emefcy set up a dedicated production facility in Wuhan, Hubei if they had become a legitimate partner.

The Zhejiang Tiandi patent was necessary to protect their design of process flow from competitors, as the original Emefcy patent for process flow hadn't necessarily been updated for China since the revision to Aspiral containers from the original 1st gen design. Process flow imo isn't as specifically important for Fluence, as each partner will specify a slightly different design and will adapt the process to their specific type of implementation. The MABR units and clarifiers are where the important IP is held, as well as in the assembly of the Aspiral units.


As you can see above, each customer has altered the design requirements slightly. While the Aspiral containers are relatively standard, the placement and type of clarifiers, control units, chemical dosing and process flow is different depending on the customer.