We are currently spending time with Spiecapag on our "business developmental initiatives" from a business partnership perspective. Spiecapag is Group Five's JV partner on the Transet NMPP project (DBN-JHB) pipeline worth about R3bn.
To give you an idea, Spiecapag is part of the ENTREPOSE Contracting group of companies in France, providing an extensive range of services covering project finance, design, engineering, procurement, construction, project management, training, commissioning & maintenance of oil, gas & energy pipeline projects globally. They operate through many subsidiaries across the globe with an annual turnover of about 300 million euro.
Current projects on their order book include;
1. US$ 660million BTC & SCP for projects in Georgia & Azerbaijan for a BP led consortium,
2. US$ 500million Sonatrach project in Algeria,
3. US$ 250million Sea Gas project in Australia,
4. US$ 420million Chad - Cameroon project for ExxonMobil led consortium,
5. 500million Euro onshore pipeline project in Papua New Guinea,
6. 241million Euro LNG onshore pipeline project in Angola.
7. 110million Euro MelGaz pipeline facilities project also in Algeria, etc.
Spiecapag has been in operation for over 80 years and are operational in over 60 countries covering 5 continents, to give you an idea of the size of the organisation. Albertyn & I have been working on various elements within the organisation and will share this with you in due course.
See pics of our orientation to this organisation, as well as a very good colleague of ours, Mr Laurent Lefevre - a short frenchman with a good sense of humour. We are busy teaching him Afrikaans & now he has learnt to swear the other frenchman in the company with them not knowing what the heck he is saying.... classic!
Speaking about Afrikaans... myself & Albertyn were a bit grupmy & frustrated the other day with the daily commute of approx 90mins each way (work & back) so we strated our conversation on the tube in Afrikaans, giving vent to our feelings. Little do we know, there is this tannie in one corner of the tube that walks up to us & starts talking to us like old friends do, it turns out she's been in Paris for 17 years - married & working here but she is formerly from CT and misses home plenty. Anyhow we continue talking code language about the arrogance of the french, etc. & at the next station, a voice from the front says, "julle manne moenie so hard afrikaans praat nie" - on se' hel, maar wie kan dit nou wees, it turn out this is a couple from Centurion on honeymoon, also battling with the french language - basically if you don;t know it, you're gonna battle getting around.
Code language Afrikaans..... what an experience, I mean what are the chances that we hook up with people that share our frame of reference, when people don't even speak english here.
Eish...
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