A COMPANY which designs and makes equipment for the buoyant subsea oil and gas sector aims to double its sales of £7.5m within three years.
County Durham-based Subsea Innovation, which is a member of energy sector business development organisation NOF Energy, employs 35 people at its Darlington headquarters and manufacturing facility.
The business was hived off from Newton Aycliffe-based Tekmar Group, which focuses on the oil and gas sector, more than 18 months ago.
The other half of the business, Tekmar Energy, was bought by London-based Elysian Capital to develop and manufacture the leading Teklink® Cable Protection systems used to protect power cables in a subsea environment.
Now, as a stand-alone company Subsea Innovation has the capacity to grow with both its current stable of clients and new clients across the world, providing products for the oil and gas and energy industry.
The company is a world leader in the design and build of launch and recovery systems (LARS), tether management systems (TMS), module handling systems (MPHS), with more than 100 successful projects delivered worldwide.
It also designs and manufactures a wide range of riser hang-off, pipeline repair and subsea sealing systems which have been installed on pipelines and operates as far afield as Malaysia and South America, with clients stretching from Darlington to Australia.
Managing director Martin Moon, who joined the firm in June, said: “In the next three years, we aim to work and grow with our clients to double turnover and increase the workforce in line with that expansion.
“It is important for us to progress to meet clients’ expanding needs and to continue to develop market-leading effective products in line with customers’ growing and changing requirements.
“The business has relied generally on enquiries coming in but we’re now looking to actively secure work from existing customers as well as actively going out and marketing ourselves to other customers.”
The growth will see Subsea Innovation employing additional design, project and service engineers to meet the extra workloads.
The company is part of a regional sector made up of around 50 supply chain companies, currently generating a turnover of £1bn a year, expected to grow by 29% in the next two years, and supporting more than 10,000 jobs.
Moon added: “We’re predominantly North Sea centric, but we’ve been doing work in South America, the Far East and Middle East in recent months.
“We’ve recently secured a contract with an Australian company worth £2m to the company.
“There is still a demand for oil and gas but we’re having to delve further to extract the required amount and that is why new technology is invaluable. Our current premises is big enough for the initial part of our expansion, but in 18 months’ time I can confidently predict that we’ll be looking for new facilities and more staff on our production line.”
Moon was most recently a consultant to the industry, having previously held the positions of operations director and interim managing director at CTC Marine (now DeepOcean) and directorships at Hertel UK and Aker Kvaerner Engineering Services.
