Experience and innovation DEME

The Belgian company Dredging, Environmental and Marine Engineering (DEME), based in Antwerp, believes that the key to success is to make a difference in your market. Its philosophy of offering innovative solutions, together with more than a century of specialist industrial know-how, has led it to achieve global success.

EXPERIENCE AND INNOVATION

DEME’s ability to read the dredging industry and commit substantial capital investment to further strengthen its position and allow for diversification means that it can provide an unrivalled service to its customers, and be a major player across five continents of the world. Dredging is the Antwerp-based company’s core business and it represents 70 per cent of its global activities.

And it seems DEME is making all the difference in a booming and highly competitive industry. The company recorded an annual turnover of €1.766 billion in 2011. Its investment programme up to 2013 has included the construction of 17 major dredgers and hydraulic engineering vessels.

Operating on the world stage

The recent additions to the fleet constitute quite a sizeable investment in what has become a huge flotilla, but it’s also a necessary move if DEME is to continue playing such an active role in the global dredging market. The company is permanently present in every region of the world, which is precisely why it needs to maintain such an extensive fleet.

DEME is present on every continent because it has an extensive fleet of dredgers, totalling 90 main vessels backed by a broad range of auxiliary equipment. In November last year (2012) the company named its latest self-propelled rock dredge ‘Amazone’. This new seagoing dredger is self-propelled and features 12,860 kW of total installed power. It is specially equipped for dredging hard rock formations with a rock cutter head designed for great production rates with low down-time. This latest ‘green’ vessel from DEME reflects its commitment to acting in a sustainable way.

DEME deploys its vessels to strategic points all over the world, giving the company a presence in the local market, and with it more opportunities to tender for new contracts in that area.

Aside from maintaining an enormous quantity of vessels, the company has to ensure that it has a wide variety of craft to meet the different demands posed by the diverse locations in which it works. It also helps to offset difficult periods in the market.

It needs to have a wide range of vessels to ensure that it is not just active with one type of dredger, as that would make it vulnerable and limited to certain geographical areas. Moreover, dredging is a cyclical business so DEME needs to limit the risk, and when business is low in one segment it can compensate by being strong in another area.

A strong tradition

The origin of DEME lies in Flanders, the Dutchspeaking region of Belgium. It was established as the holding company of two Belgian dredging contractors, Dredging International and Baggerwerken Decloedt. Following the buyout of the De Cloedt family shareholders in 2000, Ackermans & van Haaren – an Antwerp-based industrial investment group – and CFE, a civil contractor controlled by the French Vinci Group, now control the capital share.

Although it is now an industrial holding company, Ackermans & van Haaren started in 1852 as a general construction company and bought its first dredgers just two decades later. Baggerwerken Decloedt started its dredging business on the Belgian coast at about the same time.

With these combined years in the business, DEME is able to offers its customers a degree of experience in and knowledge of the dredging industry that is not only unsurpassed, but absolutely essential in such a competitive and demanding environment.

Diversification reaps rewards

Aside from dredging, DEME’s strategy is to possess a strong core business, supported by additional activities. One such diversification is its environmental activities that includes the remediation of silt and soil, and currently accounts for 15 per cent of its annual turnover.

Other business activities concern its marine engineering work, which involves various hydraulic activities, horizontal and vertical directional water-based drilling and the development and construction of wind farms. The company is also focused on project development to offer turnkey solutions to its clients.

DEME operates on a global scale but the company has witnessed some changes in its geographical spread. Whereas the Far East provided a strong focus for its activities in the 1990s, it is now the Middle East that is providing an important market for the company.

Its R&D teams at its headquarters in Belgium focus on creating new techniques and developing existing methods in all of its dredging, environmental and marine markets, which usually happens in the context of new tenders. n