A UAE company that initially started life as purely a manufacturers' agent is now designing, developing and manufacturing many of its own ranges.

SBH Lighting, established just two years ago, is rapidly gaining a reputation as a specialist supplier offering an extensive range of innovative and high-quality products including fibre optics, "colour change" cold cathode, and specialist dimming control systems, as well as an extensive range of energy-saving down lights. The company also provides a consultancy and advice service to enable clients such as hotels, offices and shops to make huge savings on their electricity bills. By replacing inefficient and expensive-to-operate lighting.

According to its managing director, Andrew Beresforde, "the only way to build a solid, growing business in these difficult economic times is to innovate". He strongly believes that without this approach you are just another trading company and could be selling anything.

What the company has developed is a range of extremely compact energy-saving downlights, with cutout sizes from 65mm, incorporating lamps of 5,10, and 13W. This enables them to directly replace conventional low voltage and filament bulbs of up to 60W, and do this without changing the appearance and ambience of the existing lighting scheme. Many people simply purchase a retrofit bulb and tolerate the fact that it sticks out of the ceiling, but this is not usually acceptable in a five-star hotel, or designer shop.

Manufacturing your own products, however, brings with it a whole range of challenges, especially now in the Middle East. Beresforde states "there are very few local manufacturers or even stockists of the right components, so most things have to be imported, which can be very costly and inefficient unless you purchase in large volumes". Fortunately though "demand is not an issue", and the company feels it can expand its production as much and as often as it wants to at the moment, as there are virtually no competitors in this specialist sector. Says Beresforde: "Not even the Chinese have copied us yet as they do not have an established market, and would have to learn how to sell the product to end-customers all by themselves ...that would be novel?"

The company states, "We have lots of interest in our new products from both the GCC and Europe, derived mainly from our participation at Index in October. They feel that if they can generate that much interest in a locally made product directly after the horrific events of Sept 11 then logic would suggest they are on to a 'winner'."

However the company also intends to be very selective in how it grows, as it feels it would be counter-productive to take too many orders too soon. It states: "We want to maintain a high level of service, and don't want to expose ourselves to any unnecessary credit risk posed by large projects at this stage. Cash flow is very important for a new business and we need to make sure our staff is trained to the right level of production quality.

"We have very good local backers in Messrs Al Khalili and Sons from Oman, who take a longer-term view of business development, and we are not here just to get rich quickly."

Instead Beresforde states, "We want a business that is thriving in 10 years' time, exporting locally designed and manufactured products all over the world". That will take some time but he feels it is a noble but realistic goal.

The company says it would very much like to hear from like-minded companies or individuals, as it is more than willing to share its knowledge and expertise with the right people provided this helps the local manufacturing industry to develop more wealth-creating medium-tech products. "What better way to develop a peaceful and prosperous society than to give people pride of employment in an industry, where they can say 'Designed', 'Developed' and 'Made in the Gulf"?" it asks.