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Striking the stone Israeli firms offer technology to slake the world’s thirst
MOSES parted the waters. Strauss aims merely to separate the waters from their yucky impurities. On May 18th in Shanghai Israel’s second-largest food and drinks firm will launch a high-tech purifier that not only filters water but also heats it to exactly the right temperature for making tea. Strauss has forged a joint venture with China’s Haier Group, the world’s biggest maker of white goods, to distribute it.
China is the perfect first market for such an appliance, says Rami Ronen, the boss of Strauss’s water arm. Chinese people drink a lot of tea, and their taps emit a lot of undrinkable gunge. At 4,490 yuan ($692) a pop the device is not cheap, but Chinese wallets are increasingly capacious.
Israel wants to become the Silicon Valley of water technology. The conditions are ripe: the country has plenty of scientists, an entrepreneurial culture and a desperate shortage of fresh water. Netafim, one of the world’s biggest “blue-tech” firms, got its start on a kibbutz in the Negev desert. Intrigued by an unusually large tree, an agronomist discovered that a cracked pipe fed droplets directly to its roots. After much experimentation the firm was founded in 1965 to sell what has become known as drip irrigation. Today it boasts annual sales of over $600m and a global workforce of 2,800.
In 2006 the Israeli government launched a programme to support water companies, for instance by helping them to market their products abroad. It also created (and later privatised) Kinrot Ventures, the world’s only start-up incubator specialising in water technologies.
A new crop of water-tech firms is emerging, many of them started by computer-industry veterans.
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