Face To Face: Alfredo D'Souza from RathGibson

Alfredo D'Souza, business developmen director, Middle East and India, RathGibson

Alfredo D'Souza is the business development director for the Middle East and india for RathGibson.

What is your Middle East presence?

We have established an office in Manama, Bahrain. The Middle East operation fits with our overall global development strategy.

The strategy was simple, get closer to the actual customers who are using our products, and provide real solutions and excellent service in real time, to essentially make it easier for customer to do business with us. Recently, we were awarded the honour of supplying stainless steel heat exchanger tubes for the Jebel Ali ‘M’ power station in the United Arab Emirates.
 
What are your chief upstream offerings?

Our main product lines are precision stainless steel tubes and pipes for the oil and gas and petrochemicals sectors. These are both straight lengths as well as coiled products.

We offer both welded and stainless pipe and tube. Our seamless factories specialty is providing world class tubes in extremely short lead limes, we are often called upon in emergency situations. We have invested heavily in our manufacturing facilities, bringing in high-tech equipment that enables us to explore new ways of doing things and also developing new products that enable us to grow and expand our business.

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We are proactively and aggressively turning over every stone looking for opportunities to serve existing and new customers. The 4000 MW power plant in Tata Mundra project in India and Jebel Ali ‘M’ power station are testament to the fact that we as an organisation are indeed continuing to be aggressive in the marketplace.
 
Has the economic situation affected global demand?

A number of global factors have impacted our business. First, the price of raw materials, steel and nickel in particular, has come down. Some customers began playing the waiting game of seeing how low it would go before placing orders.  Second, the extreme fluctuation in oil prices was and still is an issue.

As the price soared over $100/barrel, chemical firms were holding off on orders as their raw material costs were extremely high and at the same time, our oil business was naturally expanding. Then oil came down – so land wells and marginal well business started to dry up - but the chemical processing business started to kick in. So, we have positioned ourselves to take advantage of the swings as they occur, and not rely wholly on any particular segment.