Pekka Maukola started in district heating in the 1960s as a young engineering student on summer jobs at the Helsinki city electricity utility: two summers as an installation supervisor and, after graduating, as a section manager. In 1974 KWH Pipe, formerly Wiik & Höglund, began manufacturing foam-bonded district heating pipes and fittings in Vaasa under his leadership. A licence Pekka negotiated from Durotan of Denmark made the fast start possible, and in the energy-crisis years KWH Pipe became the clear market leader within two years.
In 1979 Pekka was invited to become marketing director of Raychem Corporation's Pipe Protection division, responsible for the whole world and based at Raychem's plants in Belgium. Four patents on sealing the casing pipe came out of that period, DualSeal among them. It is the same product Kampek sells today as Covalence DualSeal RJS‑E.
In 1986 he returned to KWH Pipe in Vaasa to head its international pipe business. Over the following years a licence was sold and a district heating pipe factory built in Busan, South Korea, and three pipes were delivered under the Han River carrying all of Seoul's district heating water. Two would have been enough, but a strategically important crossing got a spare. In 1988 came North America: KWH Pipe bought DuPont's Sclairpipe division, after which the Finnish company held over 80 percent of the Canadian polyethylene pipe market. In 1997 Pekka moved to Oklahoma as CEO of Uponor Aldyl.
From there the road led back to Europe. In Stockholm Pekka founded the consultancy Kamtek and did district heating work for Raychem and Rovanco Corporation. Raychem wanted him as its distribution channel in Finland as well, and Kampek was founded in 2000. Market share was modest at first and rose quickly on hard work and good products. Kamtek was merged into Kampek. The rest, as Pekka put it himself, is history.
In 2017 leadership passed to the next generation when his son Petteri Maukola took over. Today Petteri is Managing Director and Mikko Partti handles the warehouse and deliveries. Kampek remains a small family business with a large company's experience in protecting joints.