Al-Babtain Power & Telecommunications Company, which manufactures products mainly for construction-related fields, has developed over the past several decades as a leading exporter to Middle East and world markets.

One of the top 100 companies in Saudi Arabia, it has factories for making poles and high masts, lighting and panel boards, steel pipes and towers and steel structures as well as a testing facility for testing towers.
The company is also active in the irrigation field with a plant, Hasco Irrigation Systems, to design, manufacture and erect centre pivot irrigation systems.
Now a large and respected organisation, Al-Babtain started in humble circumstances. The company’s beginnings date back to the mid-1950s, when it was a family workshop business in Riyadh specialising in electrical fitting and maintenance.
“As Al-Babtain expanded, it acquired a solid reputation for honesty, fair dealing and extreme reliability, which placed it in the forefront of preferred contractors when the kingdom’s massive development programme began in the early 1970s,” a group spokesman said.
“Quality is a consistent theme of Al-Babtain Power & Telecommunications Company with all of its units holding  the ISO 9001 certification. The company justifies the trust and reliance of its customers through performance of the highest quality in conformance to all national and international standards, enabling it to complete anywhere in the world.”
Lighting poles was one of the first companies to be started in the group once Saudi Arabia commenced developing its infrastructure in right earnest.
Enterprises within the group are playing a significant role in their respective fields.

Al-Babtain Pole and High Mast Factory
This division has pioneered the manufacture of poles in Saudi Arabia and is today recognised as the most prominent regional specialist in the design, manufacture and supply of galvanised steel poles, high masts and monopoles with a worldwide customer base.
Leading the factory’s design department is a team of highly qualified engineers with computer-aided designs. “Attractive and aesthetically pleasing designs, both cost effective and materials efficient, are the outcome of this professional teamwork,” a factory spokesman says.
The factory has a destructive test rig facility to validate the design to the loads and stresses placed upon it. Poles are tapered for optimum materials usage and designed to withstand the required loads. Cross sections can be circular, octagonal or multi-sided with heights up to 60 m.
The finishing process of hot dip galvanising in molten zinc gives very good corrosive protection to steel, the spokesman says.
The product line includes accessories for a complete pole installation including raising and lowering gears for high masts, base plats, ladders and platforms for stadiums, lighting poles and brackets and mountings for luminaries or floodlights.
The company’s poles and high masts have been used on highways, in storage areas, harbours and docks, industrial areas and stadiums, among other places. Applications also include transmission and distribution lines and telecommunication monopoles.

Al-Babtain Lighting and Panel Board Factory
The factory is one of the leading regional manufacturers of luminaries and switchgears with its products reaching every corner of the world.
Started in the mid-1980s, it uses computer-aided design to develop and manufacture luminaries, switchgears and combinations of these and its products are manufactured in compliance with international standards including BS and IEC.
The product range includes outdoor luminaries for street lighting, flood lighting, garden lighting and switchgears for domestic, industrial and commercial sectors.
The factory has a testing laboratory well equipped to carry out routine, acceptance and type tests as well as its own electrostatic powder painting and anodising plants in addition to fabrication and assembly plants.
It has also developed an effective quality management system addressing all its business processes.

Al Babtain Structual Steel Factory
The production department is equipped with state-of-the-art machinery, and fabrication equipment includes shearing machines with capacity of up to 50 tonnes; a CNC flame cutting machine with multi-heads capable of handling any shape of cutting up to 100 mm thickness; band saw machines for flush surface cutting and punching hydraulic machines of capacity 160 tonnes.
Other equipment includes radial drilling machines for thick materials, press-break machines with capacity up to 350 tonnes to bend plates up to 12 mm and pressing machines to produce different shapes of steel products using moulds fabricated in the company’s shops with the aid of lathe milling machines.
The operations include assembly of different parts in accordance with approved shop drawings and welding in accordance with BS 5135 or AWS D1.1. The welding machines include SMAW, MIG and TIG.
For surface treatment sandblasting is carried out to the required cleanliness, followed by painting.
The company has its own in-house quality assurance/control programme and its products have been used in well-known Saudi buildings including the Sabic headquarters, Ibn Rushd, Faisaliah centre, Tabouk Shopping Mall, Al Khobar Sunset Beach and the King Abdulaziz Historical Centre.
One of its important contracts was the Mina project where it built 12,000 tents for pilgrims in its first three phases.

Al-Babtain Steel Pipe Manufacturing
The factory produces black hollow section galvanised pipes and tubes form a quarter inch to 8 and 5/8 inches diameter with 1.2 mm to 8.18 mm thickness in different lengths suitable for irrigation system pipes, column and casing pipes, light and power stepped poles, traffic light and advertising poles, industrial and construction pipes and pipes for general purposes.
These hollow sections are made from hot rolled steel coil imported from high quality steel producers and according to ASTM standard A513, A570, A572 and BS4360 or the equivalent.
The factory has a modern slitter, a cut-to-length line pipe threader (for plates and flat bars), a workshop, a galvanisation unit and a pipe mill.

Al-Babtain Tower Factory
Launched in 1984 with technical knowhow from Eucomsa of Spain, it describes itself as a one-stop shop for all towers requirements.
The company designs, manufactures, assembles and load tests towers and other lattice steel structures to defined customer specifications and international standards.
“The tower designs comply with internationally recognised structural standards for lattice steel structures used for power transmission and telecommuncation  and meet any specific requirement of customers  including government authorities,” a factory spokesman says.
“The factory is totally self-sufficient, having total in-house capability in all aspects of structure development, evolution and manufacture, which strengthens the factory’s reputation in providing sound professional support to all customer needs.”
The plant produces towers for power transmission up to 500 KV, communication towers for radio, TV, GSM and microwave applications, support structures  for substation equipment, lattice frames and trusses.
Facilities at the plant include a galvanising unit and a full-scale load testing station.
The company has a very modern hot dip galvanising  (HDG) plant with pre- and post-treatment facilities. The zinc bath is 9 m long, 1.6 m wide and 2 m deep. Customers’ own fabrication can be processed on a galvanizing basis only. The capacity of the plant is approximately 40,000 tonnes per year.
“The Al-Babtain Tower Testing Station works hand in hand with Al Babtain Tower Factory, ensuring that all activities  are performed in-house  and making Al Babtain  Tower Factory a one-stop-shop for tower needs,” the spokesman said.
The production set up includes six modern CNC machines for operations on angles and two CNC machines for work on plates. There is also a welding line , special-purpose machines and guillotines.
The production capacity is approximately 30,000 tonnes per year. All new towers are photo assembled before mass production to ensure that no problems are faced on site. A crew of well-qualified erectors dedicated to photo assembly, ground assemble the towers in an area earmarked gfor that purpose.
“Quality is a way of life at Al Babtain Tower Factory,” the spokesman said. “All processes until dispatching are carefully monitored by our trained quality controllers who ensure that all routine inspections and tests are carried out to ensure that the end products meet both the customer specification and requirements.
“In-process inspection is carried out from raw material acceptance tests to final product approval according to the recognised standards of BSS, DIN, ASTM, JIS, ISO and Saso.

Al-Babtain Testing Station
Towers and poles used as support structures for transmission lines carrying bulk electric power need to be structurally qualified for their use. This validation is granted after protoype testing.
Recognising its growing need in the Middle East, Al-Babtain established the Testing Station in 1991, which is the only one of its kind in the egion.
The station can test towers up to 500 KV and poles up to 220 KV. Testing is carried out in accordance with international standards and in line with clients’ requirements.
According to the company, the testing station has tested more than 100 towers and poles for different clients in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Oman, Kuwait, Libya, Tanzania, India, the Philippines, Korea and Mexico.

Hasco Irrigation Systems Factory
The company has nearly two decades of experience in designing, manufacturing and erecting centre pivot irrigation systems.
Hasco's former strategic alliances with the world's major centre pivot manufacturers and their dealers in Saudi Arabia enabled it to gain the knowhow for designing and manufacturing a full line of service parts for any centre pivot operation.
"Through its new system of irrigation, Hasco provides a precise method of irrigation which has the ability to cover the entire area with accurate and precise distribution of water," a factory spokesman said. He said the system brought about savings in water, manpower and fertiliser applications and that the initial installed costs of the company’s irrigation system was substantially less than any other form of fixed micro- and overhead irrigation system.

Al-Babtain Le Blanc Telecommuni-cations Systems
Al Babtain-Le Blanc Telecomm-unication Systems is a joint venture between Saudi Arabia and Canada, launched in 1993 to provide engineering, manufacturing and installation of communication towers and the turnkey implementation of their associated base station sites. The venture brings together the manufacturing and business strengths of Al Babtain Group and the technical expertise of Leblanc, Canada.

Al-Babtain Industries Company, Egypt
Al Babtain Group, seeking to expand its influence in African markets, started its Egyptian subsidiary in 2000 incorporating poles and towers factories. The factories utilised Al Babtain’s experience of two decades in design and manufacturing latticed steel transmission and communication towers.
The company is sprawled out across 62,000 sq m in the Sixth of October City.
“Al-Babtain Industries’ commitment to satisfying its customers through quality management systems resulted in the ISO 9001: 2000 registration and the establishing of an environmental management system that earned it the ISO 14001:1996 registration, the group spokesman said.