In the nearly four decades that SNC-Lavalin has operated in the Middle East and North Africa region, the project engineering major has predominantly worked on oil and gas projects.
Although the Canada-based company, which provides exhaustive services to four key industrial segments – infrastructure, oil and gas, mining and metallurgy, and power – it is the oil and gas segment which has allowed SNC-Lavalin to express its engineering and project management capabilities, accounting for 41% of global revenue in 2015.
The company has been successfully delivering projects across the entire oil and gas value chain, ranging from onshore and offshore production, gas processing and handling to refining and petrochemicals, pipelines, utilities and infrastructure, and non-process infrastructure.
The contracting company relies on its ability to deliver comprehensive services, from feasibility studies through to construction – something that allows the organisation to firmly hold the reins over project schedules and costs in an era of below par crude oil prices.
The Montreal-headquartered company’s oil and gas offering received a boost in 2015 when it acquired Kentz, an Irish firm specialised in hydrocarbon engineering, and its subsidiary Valerus.
The addition of Kentz expanded SNC-Lavalin’s regional footprint. In terms of its workforce, the company has almost quadrupled in size in the MENA region, especially in Saudi Arabia – with 14,000 employees spread across 11 regional offices, accounting for almost a third of the group’s global labour strength of 39,000.
It’s also given the enlarged company the ability to self-perform multi-discipline construction and inject an additional level of technical competence.
SNC-Lavalin has executed over 300 projects in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and Iraq, worth an estimated $12bn in the last decade.
The company’s contracting work has been enhanced by its engineering centres in Saudi Arabia, the Abu Dhabi and Dubai in the UAE and Qatar, supported by a high value engineering centre in Mumbai, India.
In 2016, the enterprise has announced winning contracts worth more than $1.1bn in the MENA region, mostly from oil and gas projects, including an $800mn-worth EPC contract, the details of which was withheld by McLean as part of SNC-Lavalin’s confidentiality agreement with its client.
Arabianoilandgas.com got hold of Rory McDonnell, executive vice president of SNC-Lavalin at ADIPEC 2016 in Abu Dhabi. Watch the video:
