Roymec Technologies is a leading firm in the South African engineering and project management field
Written by Ben Lobel & Produced by Alex Barron
Roymec Technologies, as Sales Director Hoosen Essack states, is a rather young company – only 9 years old. “As an organisation, the owners, founders, and directors are all still involved and function as employees and decision makers,” he says. “We have grown in the last nine years to be about a R100 million a year company.”
Clearly, a growth to be proud of. But that is not the only boon for the firm. Roymec has proudly evolved into a truly global company in that they supply equipment now as far as Indo¬nesia, Philipines, South America, Kazakhstan, Australia. “We’ve really grown outside of South Africa in the last couple of years,” enthuses Essack.
The ethos of this engineering and management company, he says, is the fact that people Roymec works for can see the value they offer, and goes beyond equipment. “We partner, rather than being seen as vendors,” says Essack. “People we supply equipment to become repeat customers for us, they have come back.”
As anyone remotely involved in any industry in business would attest, the point at which clients come back is somewhat of a key milestone. And what they’re coming back for is process equipment, which involves a large capital outlay for the client. It is a big commitment to the particular way the piece of equipment runs, so there has to be a large amount of trust between the client and the supplier.
“It’s quite a misleading world,” says Essack. “It’s easy for suppliers to lie to customers and tell them they’re getting something and then only deliver half the output or performance that’s expected,” he adds.
Roymec’s original entry into the industry was marked by an entry into competition with the existing brand holders and a decision over how to compete. Essack explains: “We had to enter at low cost to compete with the existing brand holders but had to perform on the same level as the existing brands.”
Despite having a low margin equipment the firm had to support that equipment; once com¬missioned they had to continue to provide the spares and the maintenance and the operating support. “There is a large degree of risk with a client committed to a supplier with a large piece of capital equipment and its very difficult to enter that market,” says Essack. “So we’ve grown from being a low cost supplier to competing with the main brandholders on an equivalent basis.”
This is certainly some achievement, and as you might expect from the circumstances, there is a continuous pressure from clients to reduce costs. As Essack notes, major capital equipment is becoming increasingly commoditised and the customers are less loyal to a particular brand as they may have been 10 or 20 years ago. But how does a company which was built on competitive prices continue to make a better and better deal for its customers?
“We’re constantly looking at the reason a certain part is in the system and see whether something can be made lighter or thinner without compromising on the performance or efficiency,” Essack reveals. “From days gone by there is a redundancy in terms of mass and size.”
Staff are of paramount importance at Roymec. The firm has all the original shareholders and there is a very low turnover in the company and a low departure rate.
“We deliberately look for the cream of the crop with employees and make sure we do what we can to make sure they won’t leave,” says Essack. “We think there’s a great amount of performance in the environment we provide for them and we believe part of the reason they don’t leave is because of the stimulating and challenging environment with a focus on support and participation.”
So where next for the company? The ura¬nium sector is an interest for Roymec and the company has been closely aligned with it in terms of projects. Roymec has supplied all of these projects bar one. “We see it as a growth industry for us,” says Essack. The company has been very close to the projects that have gone on and supplied 90 percent of those projects.
The move will correspond with a shift away from the base metals area, which Roymec has traditionally been involved with. The firm is looking to move into other energy related sectors like coal. Ultimately the firm has plans to move away from the mining sector as well, to more industrial sectors and to things such as water treatment.
“We want to grow our client base into areas we haven’t ventured into and it’s a natural evolu¬tion of an organisation of the size of ours and for the number of years we have been trading,” says Essack. “To be where we are now from our humble beginning is certainly some credit to us and its up to us to make the next step into other avenues,” he concludes