The Russians are coming - in this case to Bicester, a small market town in Oxfordshire known for its 12th century Augustinian priory and church dedicated to a grand-daughter of King Alfred the Great. The reason for the Russian interest has nothing to do with the town's Saxon history but is because it is the UK base of an expanding company which its backers hope will become a huge hit in a field vital to global industry. Ensconced since last summer in a small factory unit in Bicester is Hardide, a six-year-old company with 17 employees which offers services to industry based around treating metal with a special process to harden it and keep it free from corrosion. The process was devised by a team of scientists at Moscow State University - some of whom are shareholders and partners of the company - and who were lured to the UK to help start Hardide by Flintstone Technologies, a venture capital group. One of the Russians who was instrumental in this interesting case of east-west technology flow is Yuri Zhuk, Hardide's technical director. Against the popular view that the UK's status as a place to start and run an industrial company is on the slide, Zhuk says: "We see a lot of good opportunities here." Certainly Hardide has seen some impressive results in winning financial backing for its ideas - something that a lot of technology pioneers in the UK often complain is difficult. Since the company started operating commercially three years ago it has raised Pounds 4.5m from venture capital businesses and private investors. It is in the process of gaining a further Pounds 1.2m to buy more equipment to make possible a projected quintupling in sales this year, followed by an envisaged 100 per cent growth rate next year and in 2006. That should lead sales to expand from Pounds 114,00 last year to Pounds 4m in two years' time and possibly as high as Pounds 25m a few years after this, according to Hardide's managers - who expect the business to break even on a monthly basis by the end of this year. The main person guiding the fortunes of Hardide is Jim Murray-Smith, an enthusiastic former polymer chemist who had various jobs in engineering and chemicals before joining the world of venture capital five years ago by starting work at Flintstone. Originally given responsibility for stewarding Flintstone's investment in Hardide, Murray-Smith found the work so diverting that he joined the company as full-time managing director a year ago. He says the ideas behind the company provide a highly unusual way to add protective coatings to metal components in a range of industries. "Based on the patents that we have, I can safely say Hardide's process is unique. We are expensive but because we provide a service that - in certain applications - is a lot better than rival protective techniques we are seeing a large amount of interest in what we have to offer from all over the world." Hardide builds up revenues by charging companies a fee - which could be Pounds 5-Pounds 500 a part - for treating their metal components using its special process. The process adds a thin layer - typically 60 micrometres (millionths of a metre) - of tungsten carbide to a metal part, likely to be made from steel. Tungsten carbide coatings are well known for their role in ensuring metal parts resist abrasion and corrosion, one of the biggest headaches for the worldwide engineering industry, which costs companies hundreds of millions of dollars a year. But while the best known way of imparting this coating entails heating tungsten to about 3,000 deg C to form a plasma, the Hardide technique requires a much lower temperature of only about 600 deg C. Furthermore, the process - which involves a technique called chemical vapour deposition - enables protective coatings to be laid on the outside of intricately shaped parts, which would be highly difficult to coat using conventional techniques. "Our process means we can coat the inside diameter or steel pipes that might be just half a millimetre in thickness," says Mr Murray-Smith. "We can apply coatings to surfaces that other processes do not reach." This high accuracy and adaptability has appealed to a number of companies in the worldwide oil and gas industry, particularly in the area of coating of components used in high-performance valves used in pumps and in the drilling instruments that have to withstand a lot of wear and tear deep under the ground. A large user of Hardide's services in Graco, a Minneapolis-based company which is a world leader in paint spraying equipment and needs its components to withstand a lot of hard use in this application. "We are seeing new applications develop all the time but are trying hard to focus our activities on the most profitable areas," says Murray-Smith. "Corrosion is a huge problem for industry and companies will pay businesses like ours a lot of money if we can reduce the problems for them. If you have a pump in a hole in the ground in an oilfield which suddenly stops working because of corrosion it can cost the operator Pounds 500,000 to put it right." Recently Hardide was approached by an engine manufacturer which wanted it to "trouble shoot" a specific difficulty where the wear of specific parts was causing an unpleasant amount of exhaust smoke . This was tackled successfully by coating the offending parts using the company's process. Hardide has two furnaces for its treatment but demand is increasing so fast that it is in the process of ordering the third, likely to cost some Pounds 500,000. A UK company - Cambridge-based Advanced Furnace Technology - built the first two systems and is on a list of three businesses likely to tender for the third. Right now, UK-based companies account for 80 per cent of Hardide's sales, but by the end of the year exports will probably come to 50 per cent of the turnover and this figure will grow as Hardide attempts to drum up more interest for its ideas overseas, says Murray-Smith. Longer term, a flotation for the company is a possibility, assuming that it meets its growth targets and this option is agreed by the shareholders - which as well as Flintstone includes Oxford Technology Venture Capital Trust and a group of about 40 private investors, among them members of Hardide's management team and the original Russian inventors of the technology.