Just 18 months ago HB Rentals, a subsidiary of New Orleans firm Superior Energy Services, had no presence at all in the GCC, despite being a prominent offshore accommodation supplier in other oil and gas markets.
The company has assiduously nurtured new customers since then and is reaping the results with its second triple contract win in the space of a few months.
“At the end of last year we won three contracts, and this year we won another three,” says Mike Bradley, Director of Sales and Business Development at HB Rentals.
After its three contracts in November last year, the company has secured six to twelve month rental contracts with Abu Dhabi’s NPCC, McDermott International and liftboat specialists Hercules Offshore with a total value of over $1 million.
Hercules is taking HB’s Amber Jack self-propelled jack-up barge for at least 6 months with accomodation for eight crew, NPCC has hired four accommodation units for six months and McDermott renting a suite of living and working quarters destined for Saudi Arabian waters.
Bradley is keen to credit business development manager, Rami Miled, for his hard work in securing the relationships with customers that are so important in the region, and for getting into corner offices at Saudi Aramco, ADNOC and Qatar Petroleum.
“It’s taken about a year to secure our latest three customers,” Bradley says. “That’s the way it works here and Rami has been instrumental in our success.”
The next stage, says Bradley, is to build capacity to quickly meet demand that he is confident the company can take from the competition. The company also has an agency agreement in Abu Dhabi and ones on the way in Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Bradley is looking forward to expanding the company’s headcount when new digs are found in Dubai. The key to this expansion, Bradley says, is to go beyond shipping units to customers.
“We’re also a service provider. We have our own design, engineering and fabrication capability,” he says. “We’ll install our units offshore, complete with plumbing, power, water and sewage systems, so the client has the comfort of a turnkey solution. Our contract awards so far are at the expense of our main competition, and the reason we are beating them is because we’re about the provision of a service.”
