Following the acquisition of Alfa Laval in April 2019, LU-VE Group, listed at Milan Stock Exchange, now ranks as the third HVACR company in the world, and the second in Europe, said Fabio Liberali, member of the Board and Chief Communications Officer, CCO, LU-VE Group, who provided an extensive summary of the company’s expansion throughout 2019. “Alfa Laval added to us an additional turnover of about EUR 100 million,” said Liberali. “We also have 320 new people who joined the company, and we now have three different plants in Finland, Italy and India.”

In addition, LU-VE Group has doubled the production surface of its plant in China, he said. “We have also just started the enlargement of our plant of LU-VE India” he said. “We doubled our plant in Poland, and we are starting to double our plant in Jacksonville (Texas), in the United States.”

In view of these expansion initiatives, Livia Perrotta, Marketing Manager, Cooling Systems Business Unit, LU-VE Exchangers, highlighted that the company’s even wider and diverse portfolio of projects will help better serve the Middle East market.  Perrotta said local clients would especially benefit from the company’s industrial refrigeration coolers with low-charge ammonia as well as from its unit coolers for industrial applications – products that are ideal for CO₂ applications, and the company’s wide range of doors for refrigerated cabinets, which, he added, can reduce overall consumption, by mitigating dispersion of heat. Perrotta said the company also continues to promote adoption of natural refrigerants in the region, especially following its participation in the first trans-critical installation in the Middle East in 2018 in Jordan. The project, he said, signals the region’s interest in future-proofing its refrigeration system in view of the phase-out schedule, and interest in adopting such systems, despite the challenge of having high-ambient conditions. However, Perrotta said that it’s important for manufacturers to be proactively involved in training the customers and installers that are interested in moving in this direction. “Training is important, because the behaviour of CO2 is very different compared to other solutions, like freon and HFCs, in general,” he said. “And because the behaviour is different, the design is different, and a lot of the considerations for traditional fluids are not applicable, so it is necessary to have a lot of shared information and experiences.”