Technip India Emerges Stronger: ‘One Technip’ Revolutionizes Project Efficiency
Local expansion globally
Last appearing in the pages of Energy, Oil & Gas magazine during July 2015, Technip India has completed its ‘One Technip’ restructuring programme and today continues to strive for the greatest added-value and efficiency across all of its project management, engineering and construction activities. The company successfully completed the process of amalgamating all of its Indian operations under a single umbrella during April 2014, by way of a court approved merger to create the legal entity of Technip India. The aim of this merger was to provide a consistent value proposition to all of the company’s customers/stakeholders in India as One Technip. This has enhanced the collaboration between Technip India and other Technip group entities, allowing the business to leverage 
the synergies of its combined operations from three centres located in Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai.
Technip India operates as a 100 per cent wholly owned entity and presently maintains a workforce of some 2700 employees, which enables it to deliver a broad base of services across a range of applications within the oil and gas, onshore refining, petrochemical, LNG and fertilizer sectors and the business remains wellplaced to serve clients both domestically and abroad to this day. Indeed, since EOG previously profiled Technip India, Mr. Bhaskar Patel has taken over from Mr. Samik Mukherjee as the company’s Managing Director, inheriting a dedicated core of staff as well as a robust business that is ready to take on the market challenges generated by the depressed price of oil.
“I took over the role of CEO on June 1 2015, so have held the position of managing director for a little over a year. My predecessor left me with a very good core of management and engineering staff, so my challenge has not been with working with the company within India, but more to do with the low oil price and the resulting downturn in workload,” Bhaskar reveals. “Around a year ago Technip made some announcements relating to restructuring and reorganisation within the business and in India we have taken some of this to heart. We have reduced our personnel by around five per cent, which has not been achieved through layoffs but through natural attrition and by not replacing members of staff when they leave. Eighteen months or so ago we had around 2900 staff and today we are at around 2700 and we expect to be at around that number for the foreseeable future.”
Across the business, Technip India serves a prestigious portfolio of clients including Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited (BPCL); Oil & Natural Gas Corporation Limited (ONGC); Indian Oil Corporation Limited (IOCL): Reliance Industries Limited; Indian Petrochemicals Corporation Limited (IPCL); Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Limited (HPCL); Chennai Petroleum Corporation
Limited; GAIL (India) Limited and Gujarat State Fertilizer and Chemicals Limited. Its association with the wider Technip Group, coupled with the company’s local knowledge and experience allow Technip India to offer a unique service offering to fellow Technip subsidiaries as well as direct clients globally. “We certainly bring a level of service to market that can be considered to be quite different. For example, we have a range that begins with consulting, meaning that we can collaborate with colleagues in the UK and France to provide conceptual field assessment studies. We have a lot of data within the Technip subsidiary company, Genesis Oil and Gas Consultants as well as through the Paris and Rome offices where there is a lot of data relating to past projects,” Bhaskar explains. “From that concept stage we are able to move on to engineering, including feed and EPC operations, commissioning and pre-commissioning, which we are able to deliver through our own suite of technologies in the refining and petrochemical markets.”
Traditionally Technip India has relied on its partners within the wider Technip organisation to provide the majority of its projects, however with global oil and gas operations remaining in a period of decreased activity the company is increasingly focused on winning new contracts with clients directly. “Like everybody currently operating within the oil and gas industry we have felt the impact of the drop in oil price,” Bhaskar elaborates. “Currently around 70 per cent of our work comes from outside of India through our colleagues throughout the Technip Group while 30 per cent comes from the local market. We aim to grow the local share and once the market begins to rise and we see the same levels of external work coming into the business that we have done previously, we anticipate an overall increase in projects that will necessitate more people.”
Indeed, despite the current crisis across the oil and gas space the market for Technip India remains relatively positive, as there is currently untapped potential within the region’s subsea industry as India continues to develop its energy market. The company has been further encouraged through being awarded the title of the ‘Top Employer within India and Asia’ for the second year consecutively. This recognition demonstrates the company’s ability to ensure that it has the best people on hand as the business continues to grow during the coming years. “We are proud to have been awarded this recognition as it allows us to market ourselves in a very positive way. When it comes to bringing graduates into the business for example, we can attract good talent and to also maintain high levels of retention of these talented new employees,” Bhaskar concludes. “Currently our key focus is to execute our backlog of work in a very efficient manner and our second priority is to secure more work, which is something that we can achieve in the local Indian market in the near future.”
Technip India
Services: Project management, engineering and construction