Abalaka: Better Days Lie Ahead with Tranos’ Redefinition, Redesigning of Power Generation, Renewable Energy
So now, we want to build a renewable factory. As I said, we have enclosures for solar products, power distribution panels for solar, and we’re also making mounting brackets for solar. If you want to mount solar on your roof, you need a mounting system to hold the solar panels. If you mount it on the ground, they want to see the lights and installation.You’re still going to need different sorts of mounting. So we produce that. But on top of that, we’re now saying,‘Look, how can we add more value?’We see that our next step is to begin manufacturing solar panels
Starting off in 2008, driven by the sole desire to add a different kind of value to the target customers in the oil and gas, power, and telecommunications industries, the foremost manufacturing and innovative engineering solutions provider, Tranos Contracting Limited, has added value to its customers and the Nigerian economy through the production of quality products. The wholly Nigerian company has diversified into renewables, focused on easing Nigeria’s electricity generation crisis, by constructing a 100MW solar panel manufacturing plant. The determined founder and Chief Executive Officer of Tranos, Jude Abalaka, tells Peter Uzoho about the company’s journey, future plans and other issues. Excerpts:
For 16 years,Tranos Contracting Limited has been a major manufacturing and engineering solutions provider. How did the journey begin?
Tranos Contracting Limited started by looking at ways of being of value to customers, and, in the beginning, we were looking at how to provide services for oil and gas in terms of engineering, fabrication, some procurement around our equipment and even process equipment, rotating equipment, things like that. Very quickly, we realized that to achieve our aim, which is to grow in this space we were in - providing services or products to customers, we also had to look in other places because we realized very quickly that the products and services that we were trying to provide to oil and gas were also valuable to other industries.
So we’re now still having customers in telecoms, customers in manufacturing and, by listening to those customers, we also realized that if we’re going to be able to survive the tough business environment and grow, it was important that we increase the number of customers that we have in the industry. So we increased the value that we were providing, and it was that there were companies that probably stayed around at the same time we did, who just wanted to do supplies. These companies want item X. They just buy and deliver. But we realized that if you’re only providing value at the lower end of the pyramid, then anybody can do what you are doing, and it means we are not really doing anything special. So we then determined that we have to keep building up, increasing the sort of value that we can provide, and, in our space, the only way you can do that is to do more.
So, we started investing in our first factory in Ilupeju. And when we outgrew that one, we moved to this current one where we are now. We currently also have a second factory just down the road. And we’re already planning to even move to a bigger place. This whole thing is based on the focus of finding where people need what you can do, doing it well enough at a good price, and building on it.
What products and services does Tranos manufacture and render?
So we have a wide bouquet of services. We produce things that generally involve power distribution or power generation. And for oil and gas, we also have oil and gas industry ceiling solutions. Currently, we have the power distribution equipment we manufacture: power panels, main distribution panels, and motor control centres. We design and build all those for customers, mainly industrial. We also have these special gas generators we produce now that run on LPG. We’re not talking about converting maybe your 2.5kVA generator. Our generators are built from scratch and designed to run on LPG. The difference between that and the regular ones you see is that we are talking about higher power, from about 7.5kVA up to about 75kVA.
A large chunk of our generators have much longer service intervals. And what I mean by that is, your typical petrol generator will probably need to be serviced, maybe, every 150 hours. Diesel generators will be about 250 hours. But our gas generators can last up to 3,000 hours before you need to service them because of how it’s designed. In addition to that, it will also last longer. So we have customers who have been running our generators for more than 40,000 hours. A typical diesel generator, after 16,000 hours, you can manage it; maybe it gets to 20,000 hours, and you are happy. We have ones doing 35,000 hours, but you wouldn’t know if you didn’t check the running hours. So that’s our technology, it comes with a lot of advantages.
Besides that, you also save on fuel because our customers who use LPG have confirmed that. We have customers, especially in the telecoms sector, that have sites that will run on diesel as well as those that will run on gas. You see that they are saving so much. Continuing with our products, we also produce a lot of enclosures, and enclosures is a general term we use for technical enclosures. For example, you need an enclosure if you want to start a power generator. So we have those that we would build enclosures for power plants. For example, if you want to containerize a two-megawatt power plant, we also do that.
From something that is that big to even smaller units like small plastic enclosures that we make for meter manufacturers. So we’re building in the electricity and material industry that will require it. We make a very wide range of enclosures. In steel and plastic, we also have a product line.
We also manufacture another product line we call cable management system. Now, there’s a power supply in every industrial environment, and you need to run cables all over the place. In your house, you wouldn’t need cable trays or cable ladders. So you’d probably be running your cables either through conduits. We manufacture cable trays and cable ladders for industrial cable routing if you’re routing a lot of cables, and we’ve produced a lot of that, especially for oil and gas. So, you are talking about something that would typically be important. We now make them. That’s mainly what we do in our second factory.
Now, talking about our second factory, another product we have that we make there is gaskets. Gaskets are sealing; what you use to seal between two connections. If you have a pipe carrying any fluid like water, petrol, diesel, or crude, you have to seal it so there’s no leakage at the connection point. So, we make different types of gaskets for sealing. We also have customers, not just for oil and gas, but customers with power generation and gaskets across that range.
Again, we also have this other product group called the warehouse storage system. So, if you go to the proper warehouse, you will see that they have racks where they store things. We produce those racks. The only company we have in all this is the big racks you see, the small ones you probably see in the supermarkets. We make all those.
Now, I mentioned the idea that we are also looking at expansion.
Because you see that we’ve been at this current location for almost 10 years, and as a result of that, we are looking at expansion. I mentioned earlier that the ethos of what we do is to find the customer’s need and then try to solve that problem, always trying to solve it by adding value. Among the customers that we have currently, we have a lot of renewable energy customers, mainly solar power customers, for whom we make enclosures for their products. Some are enclosures. Some are power distribution panels.
So we’ve now decided that we made diesel generators at some point, but we decided that diesel is not clean. The world is moving towards clean power, so we moved into gas generators, which we are producing. Now taking it further, we’re now saying look, ultimately, everybody wants to move to clean fuel, clean source of power, and we’ve seen that we have customers using our enclosures for solar, we have customers, we have products for, you know when you mount solar panels, we have products for mounting solar panels.
So now, we want to build a renewable factory. As I said, we have enclosures for solar products, power distribution panels for solar, and we’re also making mounting brackets for solar. If you want to mount solar on your roof, you need a mounting system to