HOH Water to Sell Filter, but Key Product Still Late

HOH Water Technology Corp. says it will soon start selling a product for the first time in its 10-year history. But it won’t be the elaborate new line of water-filtration devices that HOH was founded to produce.

HOH said last week that it plans to start selling a modest, under-the-sink water purifier this month. The more deluxe systems, called Electropure, won’t be ready for several more months.

In January, HOH’s then-President David C. Kravitz announced that after securing $3.5 million in financing, the company expected to begin producing the long-awaited Electropure systems at a plant in Puerto Rico in about six months. The company also said it agreed to buy a San Diego water filtration equipment distributor.

Thanks to the new financing, HOH, which has lost about $14 million since it was founded, reported positive working capital of $595,785 as of Jan. 31, compared to a working capital deficit of $1.14 million three months earlier.

“Our long wait is over,” Kravitz said in a Jan. 22 statement.

But Kravitz may have spoken too soon. HOH now says it won’t be ready to produce the Electropure systems, which could cost up to $4,000 each, until the last quarter of 1990. In the meantime, HOH plans to sell its simpler device for less than a tenth that price.

HOH’s new under-the-sink purifier is much like other such products already on the market. Unlike the Electropure, which is meant to filter water for an entire home or factory, the new device has been on HOH’s drawing boards only since January.

HOH also might not start manufacturing the simpler purifiers in Puerto Rico. HOH will only manufacture the purifiers there if it completes a deal with a distributor to sell some of them in Puerto Rico and Florida, or if sales in Southern California, Arizona and Nevada exceed about 3,000 per month. Otherwise, it will make them only in Newbury Park.

Also, the deal to buy the San Diego distributor fell through when the company was unable to produce audited financial statements earlier this year.

And Kravitz is no longer president of the HOH--a fact the company had not yet publicly announced. He resigned as president in April and moved to Montana “to rejoin his family,” according to HOH director James E. Cruver.

HOH is likely to announce this week the permanent appointment of Carroll Mohr, who has been acting president since Kravitz resigned, Cruver said.

Cruver said the plan to sell the simpler purifier was a big change for HOH. He said that for some time he “had been a lobby of one,” arguing that HOH should sell something other than the Electropure system.

HOH still has to perform field tests on its Electropure systems to show that the systems work on a variety of water types, Cruver said.