Saturday 17 May 2014

KKB Engineering associate company eyeing RM700m oil and gas contracts

KKB Engineering Bhd’s 43%-owned OceanMight Sdn Bhd has bid for contracts worth some RM700mil to fabricate offshore facilities for the oil and gas (O&G) industry.

Director Kho Pok Tong said OceanMight had submitted five tenders on invitation by oil majors to fabricate offshore structures like jacket, topside and heli-deck in the past four to five months.

He said the contracts the company had bid for were in different scope of works, from procurement and construction (PC), engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) to engineering, procurment, construction, installation and commissiong (EPCIC).

“The outcome of the tenders could be expected in the second half of this year,” Kho told StarBiz after KKB Engineering Bhd’s AGM yesterday.

OceanMight was recently granted a licence by Petroliam Nasional Bhd (Petronas) to fabricate offshore facilities for the O&G industry.

OceanMight’s other shareholders are Kuala Lumpur-based Annexe Fair Sdn Bhd (37%) and Edisi Optima Sdn Bhd (20%), also an associate of KKB. Effectively, KKB owns 51% of OceanMight, which has obtained ISO 9001:2008 and OHSAS 18001:2007 certifications from France-based Bureau Veritas.

To facilitate fabrication of offshore structures for the O&G industry, KKB group has invested about RM86mil in a new steel fabrication yard along Jalan Bako near here.

The new facilities built include five covered fabrication workshops and two loadout jetties, which could handle up to 30,000 tonnes of steel structures.

Kho, who is also KKB group executive director, said the company had invested in modern and automated equipment to increase efficiency and output as well as ensure quality of the fabricated offshore structures.

“The new yard is geared towards a modernised O&G offshore fabrication.”

He said KKB board had approved a standby capital expenditure (capex) of RM50mil for three years up to June 2016 for offshore structure fabrication projects.

According to Kho, OceanMight had assembled a project management team with qualified senior technical people and that the number of team members would be increased to 105 by year-end.

The diversification into offshore structure fabrication is in line wth KKB group’s long-term ambition to move up the value chain in structural steel fabrication to complement its traditional activities.

Besides core steel fabrication, KKB manufactures steel pipes and liquified petroleum gas (LPG) cylinders and is into hot-dip galvanising business and civil construction. The group owns fabrication and manufacturing plants in Sarawak and Sabah.

Kho said besides tenders submitted by OceanMight, KKB group had bid for another RM100mil worth of contracts as of March 31 this year.