Growing global demand for innovative technology developed in Aberdeen was highlighted alongside results from Plexus Holdings yesterday.
The Granite City oil and gas engineering firm said new business around the world was reducing its “historic dependence” on the UK North Sea at a time when exploration activities were showing a marked decline.
But it also said there were encouraging signs in the recent Budget of a possible “renaissance” for the industry in the UK, adding this would be “very positive for our closer-to-home activities”.
The company’s business involves renting and selling wellhead products and associated equipment to oil and gas operators.
Its flagship product is its patented POS-GRIP wellhead technology, which has been used in hundreds of oil and gas wells globally.
Finance director Graham Stevens said Plexus continued to grow its business overseas during the final six months of 2013, to the extent that exports of the technology accounted for 41% of total sales.
This was up from 29% a year earlier as the firm cushioned itself against declining exploration and appraisal activity levels in the UK North Sea.
But Mr Stevens said Chancellor George Osborne’s Budget promise of a new allowance for high pressure, high temperature fields (HPHT) and UK Government backing for Sir Ian Wood’s recent review of the UK Continental Shelf were a major “shot in the arm”.
Plexus has its core business in jack-up rig exploration rental wellhead activities, where it sees significant expansion opportunities in regions such as Asia, the Gulf of Mexico, the Middle East and Russia, as well as closer to home.
But it is also keen to broaden the scope of its products into the subsea and surface production wellhead markets.
“We are only scratching the surface,” Mr Stevens said after Plexus posted a 10% rise in first half pre-tax profits to £1.9million.
Revenue was up by 12% on the same period a year earlier, at £12.64million.
International growth plans include an Asian sales and service hub – the firm has premises in Singapore and is in talks with a Malaysian joint venture partner it hopes will lead to a licence from state-owned oil company Petronas for the supply of wellhead equipment.
One of the few small companies operating in an area dominated by big players like GE Oil and Gas and FMC Technologies, Plexus is hoping to become the go-to provider of subsea wellheads for HPHT wells, which mark the next frontier of big oil finds in places like the Gulf of Mexico, Brazil and the Caspian Sea.
To achieve this the company, which employs 145 people, said it had increased spending in research and development by 21%.
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