Richard Barr and Lawrance Chessor from our sampling team based at Greenbank in Aberdeen explain the rationale behind our recent tie-up with dpUNION, a long-established São Paulo based supplier of analytical and laboratory equipment.
What essentially have you set up with dpUNION?
We have set up an agreement where dpUNION will be the distributor for our products, and for sampling more generally, across Brazil. To have someone locally in-country rather than having to refer back to Aberdeen is clearly an advantage. We have been travelling to Brazil quite regularly in recent years and increasingly the feedback we were getting from customers, and the market, was that it would be easier for them to deal with a local contact.
We have been getting more and more enquiries from potential clients, including from universities and technology centres, and so this process of evaluating a potential local distributor has gradually evolved. We really started to move on it back in 2022, so it has been a carefully considered and detailed process before we came to this arrangement with dpUNION.
The essential aim of this tie-up will be focused on the sales element of our product offering. We can harness dpUNION’s local footprint, receive an order and either turn around equipment we already have in stock or manufacture to requirements very quickly and ship the product fast. It is a good set-up that gives us much more traction locally and enables us to get kit to customers equally effectively.
Caption: Lawrance Chessor (left) and Richard Barr from Proserv’s sampling team
What attracted you to working alongside dpUNION?
We sought to target a suitable party and one of our good customers, a very well-respected international laboratory and analysis provider, put forward dpUNION’s name. To get a recommendation from a partner like that is clearly an ideal starting point. dpUNION has a long-standing reputation in Brazil, stretching back almost 40 years, with multiple accreditations too.
The sort of products that dpUNION specialises in supplying, including laboratory and analysis equipment, is obviously a good fit with our offering, such as our sampling cylinders. Some of what dpUNION provides can be used in conjunction with our own kit too. dpUNION was also already working with several of our customers, via their own product lines, so there was a really useful overlap there. These connections and potential synergies made total sense.
dpUNION has coverage across all the major cities and regions in Brazil, with numerous dedicated sales individuals, including specifically for the major energy players in the domestic market. So, one exciting element is that we can combine our product portfolio with dpUNION’s contact network and relationships to hopefully leverage further opportunities.
Why have you targeted Brazil for such an arrangement?
It is a fast-growing energy hub with a lot of potential and significant investment coming into it. For instance, it is the world leader in deepwater and ultra-deepwater activity and over the next few years, multiple floating production storage and offloading (FPSOs) facilities will be coming on-stream. So, there are strong opportunities for us to drive our equipment into the market, including our sampling cylinders and possibly our unique subsea sampling capabilities
What is additionally interesting is that in Brazil, to support research centres at universities and technology centres, a percentage of revenue from the industry is channelled back into academia to accelerate the development and rollout of more laboratories and equipment. This plays very well into our own expertise and product offering around analysis and testing, and one of our on-going projects is with a university in Rio de Janeiro which is developing a new lab that is being funded by one of the global majors.
But the big local O&G companies also run key labs to support their production needs and analysis, and again these represent an exciting market for us.
More broadly, if we can harness our new relationship with dpUNION and build our reputation and presence even further across the South American region, we can also potentially use this as a launch pad for entering other markets, such as Guyana – another rapidly evolving location.
Equally, another element to our tie-up with dpUNION is that its business is not solely focused on supplying equipment to the energy sector – it also has activities in numerous different areas, from food and drink to pharmaceuticals. Perhaps new openings will emerge for our own products and solutions in totally unexpected areas that we hadn’t previously considered.
Caption: Élcio Hobi de Oliveira (left) and André Sanches from dpUNION’s team
How has this new tie-up been going so far?
It has been good. Already a few smaller orders are close to getting over the line to set things moving. We were in Brazil earlier in the year as part of providing some training to dpUNION’s team and we are hoping to go back out there in the next couple of months. The aim at that point is to get out into the market alongside dpUNION and to meet a number of possible future customers. We will be able to maximise dpUNION’s local in-country presence to set up and facilitate these meetings.
Our plan is to travel out to Brazil on a regular basis to touch base with prospective customers and we can also use scheduled local industry events to work alongside dpUNION to jointly push our collaboration and offerings.
It is an exciting new arrangement, and we hope to move forward with dpUNION over the next 12 months. Brazil, with its very deep, offshore pre-salt fields presents opportunities for us, and we know our sampling cylinders and equipment have been engineered and manufactured to face the technical challenges presented by such corrosive and extreme environments.