Oil and gas services company Safehouse Habitats, which mitigates the dangers of working in explosive or flammable environments, is to open its first office in Asia, in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur. The company is pursuing an aggressive overseas expansion, and the KL office will also serve as a base to manage the firm's growing operations in Singapore, Vietnam, Myanmar, Thailand and the Philippines.
The Dundee-based firm, whose 11 per cent growth in turnover last year to £19.2 million helped it to top the Business Insider SME 300 league table now has outposts in what it calls the "five key energy hubs": UK/Europe, Malaysia, UAE, Australia and the US. As well as a Southeast Asian sub-office due to open in December, the firm is now seeking premises in Houston, Texas.
Founded by Mike Garty and Graham Watters in 2001, the firm designs and supplies engineered enclosures to allow high risk activities such as welding to take place around hazardous oil and gas working areas.
The expansion comes a year after private equity firms Simmons Private Equity and First Reserve Momentum took control of the firm, tasking chief executive Gordon Mackay with leading an ambitious international growth strategy
Mackay said: “Under the previous owner-proprietor model Safehouse grew from humble beginnings to a good sized SME in around 10 years. Current investors recognised the opportunity to build on this success and will take the company to the next level, a goal we’ve been working towards since we took the reins about a year ago."
“It’s been an incredible first year for me at Safehouse. We’ve restructured the business and made some key appointments so we’re now in a good place to grow internationally. We established our presence in Abu Dhabi last year and we’re working on a number of strategic partnerships that will see Safehouse become a globally recognised safety brand.”
Claiming to offer the world's only fully certified "hot work habitat" the company has stated its ambition to "maintain our position as the global market leader in safe hot work solutions for hazardous environments".
Traditionally "hot work" was deemed too big a risk or too likely to cause serious interruption to other activity, plants or installations would commonly shut-down before hot work could be carried out, a problem that Safehouse's services offered to solve.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here