Ducab, now celebrating its 40th year of success, is a home-grown manufacturing company. The brand is known to be one of the first established manufacturing facilities in the GCC and is now present in more than 30 countries.
The company has been a dedicated supplier to the GCC region for the past 40 years. Over the years, it has expanded its portfolio of cable, wires and accessories to include copper rod, copper conductors, aluminium rod and overhead line. Ducab’s cable range includes low voltage products, all the way through to 400 kV, as well as extra-high voltage and overhead line for the transmissions sector.
Energy Review sat down with Ducab’s CEO, Andrew Shaw, for an exclusive interview at World Energy Congress 2019 to discuss the latest challenges and opportunities that are facing the industry, as well as the secret behind the company’s unwavering success story of 40 years.
Could you provide our readers with some insight into the work Ducab has been doing in the GCC region?
Within the GCC, we were one of the first cable makers established and in fact, Ducab will be 40 years old this year. For the last four decades we have been supplying our ‘made in UAE’ cables to projects across the region, and even further afield in countries across the world. We’ve had the privilege of being involved in some of the most iconic projects in the GCC, including the Dhofar Wind Farm in Salalah, Oman and the Riyadh Metro in Saudi Arabia, to mention just a couple. In the UAE we have supplied cables to groundbreaking developments such as Dubai Opera, Dubai Metro, the Burj Khalifa, Emirates Palace and Yas Marina Circuit, amongst many others. In response to the changing energy sector in the UAE and region, we developed a custom range of cables suited to the solar and nuclear power sectors. Our nuclear cable range, NuBICC, supplied to the Barakah Nuclear Power Plant in Abu Dhabi is the first specially developed and certified for more than 60 years of operations in the nuclear power generation sector.
What are some of Ducab’s highlights for 2019?
In the midst of what has been a low year for the construction industry in general, Ducab has had several highlights. DAC was inaugurated at the beginning of the year in Abu Dhabi to expand its aluminum products portfolio. We’re especially pleased to have seen continued progress in our export markets- both for the cables and the metals business units. As an example of this, we have recently supplied the UK’s Royal Navy build with power cables. Our business in Asia has seen continued growth, and we have conducted a lot of work in Australia – which actually led to a breakthrough with our specialist naval defense cables.
Closer to home in the UAE, I think we have been involved in nearly every current major project. Dubai’s Expo 2020 has given us a wonderful opportunity to showcase our products; Ducab’s cables are being used in the vast majority of projects at the Expo 2020 site, including the entire Dubai Metro Route 2020 project. Ducab HV successfully designed, installed and commissioned the entire 132kv high voltage cable systems for the MBR Solar Park, which by the time it finishes, will be the largest solar park in the world.
You mentioned earlier that it has been a difficult year for the industry. Would you mind expanding on that?
If you look at the overall GCC, construction has slowed down. There are some hotspot exceptions, though, such as Dubai.
From an industry perspective there is a lot of cable manufacturing capacity in the market, which is causing a slowdown in growth. However, construction is a very competitive market, so even though there is activity, it can still be tough to make good business out of it because everyone is chasing the same opportunities.
Could you comment on the MENA region’s position in the industry?
If you look at the world’s overall cable & wire industry, the MENA region used to be one of the high-growth areas and used to pull in a great deal of capacity. The GCC and the broader MENA region is well-supplied; factories are modern and run on efficient equipment. But, as I mentioned previously, growth has slowed down, which can be attributed to oil prices declining. This isn’t a permanent situation, of course. We are confident that things will look up in the near future.
The Middle East is known to have one of the highest rates of energy consumption in the world. Could you comment on this from Ducab’s perspective? How is the company being affected by this demand?
We are in the business of supplying energy, so growth in energy consumption is anticipated in our market. More electricity means more cables. Ducab has a wide range of cables to supply nuclear, clean energy, solar projects, or even conventional power stations, and we are ready to power the energy sector’s progress. Even electric vehicles are going to need more cables in the medium to long-term, so the outlook for the future is rosy. The world is progressing towards more electric-powered solutions, and electricity needs cables, so we will continue to invest in developing our business to meet the needs of today and tomorrow.
In your opinion what are some of the biggest challenges facing the market?
I think at the moment, the main challenge is oversupply. It is quite a competitive market, that constantly exerts downward pressure on the margins.
The UAE is a very open market which means that we attract competition from everywhere, so as a local manufacturer, we are very conscious of the work that goes in to stay a leader in the market. We are a large company, exporting makes sense for us. This is making us become more protectionist for very understandable reasons, and it is reducing the number of markets we are able to go with easily.
I think for broader supply into the construction industry, there’s a shortage of liquidity in the market. There may be projects ready to call on raw materials, but they don’t have the cable or the money and hence are unable to progress with the projects, so in the short term, that is a key issue for the construction industry.
Emerging technologies are rapidly gaining ground, seeping their way into even the more traditional, legacy industries which are trying to initiate digital transformation. What is Ducab’s current position in terms of digital transformation?
We are at the very beginning of that journey, and we’re experiencing it in two ways.
One of them is looking at ways to make it easier for our customers to deal with us, so we are using digital solutions to simplify things and become more digital to enable customers to deal with us more efficiently.
The other is that we are a big manufacturer. Digital transformation across a large business is rarely quick. We have, however, made great progress in collecting data from the shop floor so that we can improve the productivity of the machinery and improve our material utilization, while also assessing internal efficiency to reduce costs.
Ducab will soon celebrate its 40th anniversary. What are the key factors that contributed to the company’s 40 years of success?
Yes, we will celebrate our 40th anniversary in November this year.
Right from the beginning, even though Ducab was set up by a British cabling company, they were not allowed to use their brand so they had to establish their own. As a new brand based in the UAE, Ducab had to try a bit harder; there was the perception in the market back then that products manufactured in more established markets – the UK or Germany, for example – were better quality than locally-made counterparts.
We’ve always pushed hard to create a brand associated with quality, but I think, today, we have achieved that – while also demonstrating to the world that the UAE’s manufacturing sector creates products capable of competing on a global scale. If you ask anyone in our market today for one word to describe Ducab, they may argue about many things, but never about quality. Ducab today is synonymous with quality.
Our business started with one factory in Jebel Ali, in Dubai. Now, we have six facilities located across the country.
To summarize, in answer to your question: Ducab has continued to grow as a result of our unwavering focus on quality and constant investment, which has allowed us to introduce our ‘made in UAE’ products to numerous markets across the world.
