Growing Pains

Nick Parton, Megger.

With the power infrastructure in the Middle East expanding at a rapid pace, suppliers and service providers of electrical testing and diagnostics are confronted with a very particular market.

“It is still a relatively young market in that much of the installed plant and machinery is less than 30 years old compared to Europe or North America, where it can be over 60 years old,” says Andy Hedgecock, Middle East manager at Omicron. “Therefore the need for testing and diagnostics has not been so high but of course that has rapidly changed over the past ten years.”

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On the other hand, the growth of the sector means that business is brisk. “The electrical power and industrial infrastructure is expanding an incredible rate and so now the latest testing methods are being applied along with new technologies.

The combination of these two factors means that demand for electrical testing and diagnostics is exceptionally high in the Middle East,” says Hedgecock, who describes the region as an important market for Omicron, accounting for 12 percent of its worldwide business.

“The Middle Eastern market differs to other markets in the world in terms of degree, pace and scale of development of both the electrical infrastructure and the industrial base,” sums up Nick Parton, sales manager at Megger, who have been growing at around 15 percent in the region over the last five years.

Those growth rates were not significantly impaired by the recession. Both Hedgecock and Parton speak of a relative decline in business, albeit not at the rates experienced before.

“There was no real decline, more of a temporary slow-down as budgets were held back to see how serious the recession was but by the end of the year it was business as usual,” says Omicron’s Hedgecock.

Megger, who equally did not experience a serious downturn in business, could yet suffer from a sting in the tail of the recession, says Parton: “The question is still ‘will’ rather than ‘did’.

Our business tends to come at the end of the project, and the slowdown in new projects during the last 18 months has probably still not hit us fully yet.”