Mark D?Mello, president of BlueScope Water, says he is here to build brand recognition and meet clients from further afield.
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Dominating the Australia pavilion’s skyline in Hall 8 is the cut-out steel shelled water storage solution from Pioneer Water Tanks, a division of the BlueScope Water Company.
The potable water storage tanks being exhibited at Big 5 have a strong pedigree in the Middle East, serving remote sites and labour camps in the Emirates for a number of years, so Mark D’Mello, president of BlueScope Water, says he is here to build brand recognition and meet clients from further afield.
“We have been in the UAE since 1991, but Big 5 is a great opportunity to engage with our local customers, and is a good meeting point for clients from the surrounding region. We’ve been able to meet up with a great client who works exclusively in Kazakhstan, so it has been a good couple of days,” said D’Mello.
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The company is using Big 5 to build awareness of its steel shell, impervious polymer membrane lined water tanks, which are capable of holding an industry leading capacity of 2.6 million litres.
“The units are modular, so anything from 12,000 litres and up can be catered to. Labour camps and remote sites are our biggest markets in the Middle East,” said D’Mello.
The product on display is part of the company’s core line of Galaxy branded water tanks. For most of the standard modular units the outer steel shell can be assembled and dismantled in under a day, and because it comes in panel form is fully transportable.
“The two major advantages this product has over its plastic counterparts is that there is no special logistical requirement, the product can be containerised or loaded onto a standard truck, and secondly, the structural integrity of the steel shell means it can hold much larger volumes of water,” explained D’Mello.
Plastic water storage units typically have a maximum volume of 5000 gallons, any weight above this and the pressure begins to warp or split the product. Poured concrete water storage solutions often suffer from cracking damage due to the vibrations caused by heavy vehicles and on a construction site.
“Water will always find these cracks, so liquid loss is a real problem, plus these structures are time consuming and labour intensive to set up,” he said.
The company has close ties with the construction sector, and its fortunes have been linked to the slowdown in certain parts of the Gulf. “The volume of business did take a bit of a hit. We have seen that pick up again in the last two to three months which is definitely encouraging, but the real issue has been payment collection. We have had to be extremely flexible with our clients and create new payment schedules, so that has been tough,” revealed D’Mello.
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