Q-Mass, a high-tech maker of precision equipment for the oil and gas industry worldwide is defying the offshore slump with a £4 million expansion, as it seeks to diversify into the renewables, defence and nuclear power.
The £10m-turnover Uddingston-based company, which employs 53 people, will this month move to a site five times larger than its current premises, in the second move since foundation in Stirling by owners Ronnie Robertson and John Harvey in 2006.
The specialised company claims to be one of the few machining companies in the UK capable of producing metalwork to within a tenth of one thousandth of an inch of the original specification.
Formerly focussed on highly-engineered steel components such as valves and drill parts for the oil and gas sector, the plunge in the oil price and subsequent investment drought has prompted a search for alternative routes to growth.
Robertson told the Sunday Herald that the company was now picking up orders for offshore wind turbines as well as fracking exploration and production, a potential growth area.
As the company is a manufacturing sub-contractor for secretive multinational oil-field service companies such as Schlumberger and Halliburton, Robertson says that the Q-Mass is often in the dark as to the precise purpose of the machines it manufactures.
"We often don't know exactly what we are making for our clients. We have to sign non-disclosure agreements or are sworn to secrecy," he says.
"We simply receive the specification and we are not expected to ask too many questions as some of the equipment is patented. We don't get involved in the functionality of the design and we are sometimes asked to return the drawings after we have finished."
Although Q-Mass's clients are mostly based in Aberdeen, its products are used in oil fields in west Africa, the Caspian Sea, Brazil, the Middle East and the Far East as well as the UK and Norwegian sectors of the North Sea.
That wide geographic spread has partly sheltered the company from the oil downturn of the last 12 months, which has crippled investment in the high-cost North Sea.
"We think there is a big future in the oil and gas industry," Robertson said. "There is a lot of volatility at the moment but we are taking the long-term approach to investment. Every oil well in the world is different in terms of its temperature, its pressure and so on so we think demand for our bespoke products will remain high."
"Sixty per cent of what we produce is exported but, so far, it has been exported by our customers. In the future we hope to sell more overseas directly."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article