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Cooling-As-A-Service: Meet David Mackerness, Director at Kaer

Welcome to the second episode of the Product-As-A-Service Champions Podcast! Join us as Yann Toutant, CEO of Black Winch, discusses Cooling-as-a-Service with David Mackerness, Director at Kaer.

David Mackerness

Director - Kaer

Guest speaker

20 years of experience in telling stories to bring consumer data and insights to life.
Interested in consumer & market research, data and customer-centric product design.
Experience in FMCG - consumer healthcare - real estate - automotive.

About Kaer

Kaer is one of Asia's largest CaaS (Cooling-as-a-Service) providers.

They specialize in providing cooling to commercial and industrial buildings throughout Asia.

Kaer pioneered the CaaS business model and continue to bring innovation and expertise to their customers to help them transition confidently to a more reliable and sustainable future.

Cooling-As-A-Service

Through their CaaS offering, Kaer will accelerate the transition to a low carbon and climate resilient future by meeting this demand with clean & renewable cooling.

Following a servitization approach, CaaS delivers a competitive advantage for businesses by giving them the option to purchase cooling in much the same way that they purchase electricity and water today.

Instead of investing in and operating cooling equipment, customers simply dictate the conditions they want to achieve. Kaer assumes all financial and operational responsibility to deliver the conditions and they simply buy cooling at a fixed $/RTH rate on a pay-as-you-use basis.

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Key insights

"For us it was really a natural progression from representing products to being sort of like a turnkey contractor or a systems integrator and then moving to as a service. And essentially the reason we made that transition was because we found that customers were asking for things that we weren’t selling."

"Our customers didn't want to discuss equipment or energy consumption. They wanted 24 degrees."

"It was just, you know, you sell the cooling just like you would sell electricity or sell water so it’s a natural progression for us really but driven by the customer."

"I think the main challenge we had is that you’re taking traditionally a CAPEX heavy business with a very long lifecycle of that equipment that you’re installing and you’re turning that into one bucket of pricing so there’s no capex budget and opex budget, there’s purely a dollar per ton hour rate that you’re providing so I think you’re kind of disrupting the industry by offering something in a very different way."

"If I say to you cooling in your building is 50 cents per refrigerant ton hour what does that mean? How much does that cost per month or per year? There’s really a lot of education around the model and the pricing. We overcame that by not focusing specifically on buildings that would benefit from CaaS but focusing on customers who were receptive to CaaS."

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