SUBSEA engineering specialist Tekmar is on a rapid growth curve with revenues trebling to £15m following the successful launch of its patented, offshore wind power technology.
Established in Norway in 1985, it relocated to Newton Aycliffe in 1992 and by 2000 it was fully-owned by Darlington-born engineer Gary Ritchie-Bland.
Its recent rapid growth has been fuelled by the success of its unique cable system, called Teklink, which helps transfer the power generated from offshore wind turbines.
Ritchie-Bland said that in the last year it has won 90% of all such offshore cabling contracts placed in Europe and to cope with demand it has doubled its workforce to 60 and transferred all of its subsea oil and gas work to a new factory in Darlington.
“We have invested £3.5m in the last year in machinery and workspace to set us up for the level of orders and demand anticipated in 2011,” he said. “Revenues have trebled in the last three years to £15m and we expect to achieve £20m this year.
“We have the capacity to double revenues again and are considering adding a second shift, and then after that, possibly a third shift. There is no reason why we cannot double staff numbers and sales over the next two years.”
For more than 20 years Tekmar has been at the forefront of the region’s subsea oil and gas sector, designing and manufacturing topside cranes and hydraulic equipment for industry giants like Technip. Tekmar Subsea now handles all of its work in this sector and Tekmar Energy, which was formed in 2008, handles all of the work in the offshore renewable sector.
Ritchie-Bland joined Tekmar in 1996 and persuaded it to move to the North East, ahead of Aberdeen, due to the highly-skilled North East workforce and the well-established offshore facilities in the region.
He says Teklink was developed following intensive work at the Narec facility at Blyth where a series of unsuccessful trials in transferring power from a turbine meant new technology needed to be developed.
Ritchie-Bland added: “We sat down with a clean piece of paper and developed a new way of doing it. We have called this the Teklink system and in the last year we have won every single contract we have bid for in the cable protection field.”
The Newton Aycliffe headquarters is concentrating on the manufacture of its Teklink underwater cable.
Tekmar Energy has just completed its first UK wind farm project supplying 103 Teklink systems to the Walney 1 Wind Farm project located approximately 20 miles west of Barrow.
The success of the project has landed the company a follow-on contract of over 60 further systems and it is now looking to develop new markets negotiating agent agreements in Brazil, Libya and Egypt.