JH Waterway strives to provide quality tap water

By Kim Ji-soo

At 17, one rarely knows or has an inkling of what he or she might want to do in life. Shim Hak-sub, president and CEO of JH Waterway, agrees — people usually need a shocking event to be able to think that far ahead. For him, it was a family tragedy, the death of his mother, and the declining family fortune that prompted him to think deeply about what he has to do with his life. After several months of deep thinking, he decided he would be a businessman who would also benefit society. He also created a life plan that included starting his business and getting married at 30.

So far, his life more or less has gone according to plan, and more than three decades later, Shim, 49, finds himself deeply immersed in the business of ensuring households have quality water. More specifically, he is using a physical ionizer, the Scale Buster, to rehabilitate water pipelines. Despite its adequate quality of water, South Koreans rarely drink from the tap, and Shim wants to change that.

“For six months, I thought deeply about what I lacked in order to do business, and it was endurance and a broad perspective,” he said. He entered Korea’s compulsory military service to learn endurance, and then he went to Dusseldorf, Germany, enrolling in the University of Dusseldorf in the early 1990s. He didn’t graduate, but that didn’t deter him from starting a business.

“In Germany, numerous expos are held, from which one can learn about various businesses,” he said, and soon enough, the industry concerning pipe corrosion prevention grabbed his attention. He said he was impressed by how Germany made strenuous efforts to tap into its acquifers to provide clean drinking water to its citizens. The Scale Buster apparatus was born in 1995, when British and German scientists incorporated Shim’s business idea into the physical water treatment technology they invented. The resulting apparatus was granted a patent in 63 countries, and Shim founded I.S. EUKO in 1996, the core product of which was the Scale Buster. The Scale Buster, also known as JH RustScale Ionizer, inhibits the development of scaling in plumbing systems and removes scaling already in the systems.

The Scale Buster differentiates itself from existing pipe protection methods such as water softeners and osmotic pressure conditioning with its nonchemical, environmentally friendly process. Essentially, the Scale Buster is an ionizer in which a specially patented zinc anodes set in fluoric-plastic (Teflon) are stored in brass tube. The brass and the zinc create 1.1volt static electricity that in turn transforms zinc into zinc ions that turn into magnetite to stop corrosion and extend life span of piping.

After doing business in Germany, Shim returned to Korea to start JH Waterway. He said he had a hard time convincing bureaucrats, the existing water treatment industry and academia that he could prove how the physical ion processor can save central and local governments, apartment complexes and factories from budget worries.

“As a young man doing business without some existing network or relying on school networks, it was indeed difficult,” he said.

JH Waterway has steadily increased its (business). Since its founding in 2000, it has supplied its products to 130 local governments, to factories and commercial buildings and to 20,000 public buildings, including the presidential office Cheong Wa Dae. Scale Buster’s advantage is that it can be applied to existing pipelines and entails only about 1 percent of the cost of replacing the pipes.

The CEO said the company floundered slightly after 2010 as it attempted to expand overseas and had to relocate its headquarters to Anseong, Gyeonggi Province from Yangjae-dong, southern Seoul. The company has since recovered and sees 10 billion won in annual sales.

He has set a high goal of achieving 100 billion won in annual sales by 2025, and in the more immediate future, he hopes to go public within the next five years.

As JH Waterway marks its 20th anniversary this year, the CEO has written a book detailing his vision as the CEO and the company’s vision. Shim said he painstakingly wrote some parts of the book, such as the section about the code of conduct for JH Waterway employees.

He said he learned the value of people in doing business.

“One of the most painful lessons that I learned as a CEO was in personnel management. As a company grows, a CEO has to start delegating,” Shim said, refusing to go into detail about this painful lesson. But after that, he said he has established a certain set of criteria in recruiting personnel. “I think the CEO should interview a prospective employee one-on-one, to determine if a candidate has sincerity and an adequate amount of ability,” Shim said. “Then the company’s role comes in, where it should provide the system, be able to clearly express the CEO’s and the company’s vision, and incorporate it into corporate culture .... The hardest part is getting your employees to have the mindset that ‘this company is mine,’” he said.

He also works closely with Lee Deok-soo, professor emeritus of chemistry at Kyungwon University and head of JH Waterway ResearchCenter­ . The two have co-invented the Greenbi water purifier to be used in households or offices. The two have also scaled various sites of Korea for mineral springs water sources, and their work is expected to be published within this year.