What is your role in the company?
After our acquisition, I was brought in to integrate the two companies. My second year’s job was growing our oil and gas vertical. Today, it is essentially expansion plans, looking for manpower, doing CAPEX requirements, building the needed infrastructure to be able to expand. Of course we have this core pipeline area in oil and gas, but we have also been working with a number of international quality service providers, which we represent as agents to provide services to our customers.
What does Unique Wellube do in oil and gas?
The core of the group’s work is pipeline intervention services and on-site services. We do hot tapping, line stopping on-site machining so anything which is on-site and reduces downtime on pipeline work, basically.
What have you been focusing on lately?
Working on crucial infrastructure. A lot of the work that we have been doing is hot tapping and ice stopping for key pipelines in the region as part of key expansion projects, which if you had to shut down, there would have been massive impacts.
What plans have you got for growing your business?
Right now we are quite GCC centred. In 2014 we decided to expand globally. We have put in the framework for our expansion goals. Right now we are in India, Aberdeen, Nigeria. In 2015 we plan to consolidate those areas and get some market share there and also move in to Saudi as a group.
What are the challenges of growing your market share?
We need to prove quality because we work on live pipelines so if you cannot show a background, history and experience, you have a problem so that will always be a big area. We had a good history and good experience so it is basically going out and educating people there is another provider out there available who has been around for ten years and who can do these jobs well if not better than some of the guys they have already being working with.
How are you looking to address the talent shortage?
That is probably one of the biggest challenges you can probably talk to anyone and they will tell you the same. Manpower wise, touch wood, so far we have been okay. We have been able to get in guys and have done quite well in retaining. We have had a low turnover, which has made our growth process.
About the interviewee
Sahil Gandhi is managing director of Unique Wellube, a division of subsea technology and service provider Unique Maritime Group (UMG). Gandhi oversees Unique Wellube in its provision of engineering services and products to a number of industries. He is also involved with the company’s expansion plans .
