Sulzer joins Spinnova's ecosystem to accelerate technology industrialization

Translation: Original published in Finnish on 4/2/2026 at 9:14 am EET.

Spinnova announced on Wednesday that Sulzer, a Swiss company focused on industrial engineering and manufacturing, has joined the company's ecosystem to accelerate the availability of SPINNOVA® fiber in the textile market. We consider the partnership a small positive step on the commercialization path, as it brings necessary process-technical expertise to the consortium. However, it is very challenging to assess the impact of the news on the remaining length or difficulty of the commercialization path for the first industrial project.

Sulzer brings critical process expertise to the industrialization of technology

Sulzer is a global industrial infrastructure player whose expertise in pumps, mixing, and fiber suspension technology is, in our view, directly applicable to Spinnova's mechanical fiber processing. The goal of the collaboration and the entire ecosystem is to accelerate the scaling of fiber supply capacity and to develop the cost-competitiveness of the process, thereby promoting the commercialization of Spinnova's technology to an industrial production scale.

Spinnova's technology is based on a mechanical process that does not use harmful chemicals, but it currently requires significant energy and precise process control. Previously, the company reported significant progress in the energy efficiency of MFC (microfibrillated cellulose) production, which serves as a raw material. Sulzer's expertise in ramping up the MFC piloting environment will support this development work in the future. In addition to Sulzer, we believe Spinnova needs at least one more partner focused on manufacturing actual process equipment for the process and equipment side of the consortium.

Ecosystem is gradually strengthening, development work will still take time

We view the cooperation between Sulzer and Spinnova positively, as it supports the commercialization path of fiber produced with Spinnova's technology. In our view, the most critical aspect for the company's investment story and value creation remains the technology sales at the core of its strategy, which requires not only building a consortium but also reducing the technology's investment and production costs to a competitive level. Although Spinnova appears to have advanced its strategy with the H2 report, especially in reducing technology investment and production costs, the remaining time until a commercial breakthrough (i.e. an investment decision) and the difficulty of overcoming obstacles on the path are still very challenging to assess from outside the company. For now, we are sticking to our estimate that the development work and the completion of partner negotiations are at least a year away, although the margin of error in this estimate is still large.