Dubai Aluminium (Dubal), celebrating 30 years since it first began operations in 1979, has received the ISO/IEC 20000 certification, the first Dubai government-owned company and the first manufacturing enterprise in the UAE to do so.

Dubal president and CEO Abdulla JM Kalban described the certification as a vital component in realising the company's vision to become one of the world's top primary aluminium producers by 2015.

'The ISO/IEC 20000 standard describes an integrated set of management processes for effective delivery of services to a business and its customers. As such, it fully supports the customer-orientated, quality- and service-driven principles of our business,' Kalban said.

With over 30 years of operations, Dubal is widely acclaimed as the emirate's industrial flagship and one of the largest non-oil contributors to Dubai's economy.

The company has fulfilled the vision of Dubal's founding father, the late Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, and the continued strategic leadership of his sons.

Dubal's smelter complex currently comprises a 960,000-tonne-per-annum primary aluminium smelter, a 2,350 MW power station (at 30°C), a large carbon plant, three casthouses (comprising a world-leading annual production capacity of 1.16 million tonnes), a desalination plant of 30 million gallons per day, laboratory and research facilities, port and storage facilities, maintenance areas and associated administration buildings. The complex is the product of six successive expansion phases, the most recent of which was completed in the second quarter of 2008.

Three main forms

Kalban: keeping the vision going

Aluminium products are manufactur-ed in three main forms: foundry alloy for automotive applications; extrusion billet for construction, industrial and transportation purposes; high purity aluminium for the electronics and aerospace industries. More than 300 customers are served in approximately 45 countries worldwide, predominantly in the Far East, Europe, Asean, Middle East and Mediterranean regions and North America.

Dubal is also widely regarded as an employer of choice, having won the 2003 Dubai Human Resources Award and the 2006 Dubai Human Resources Award-Gold. Employment is provided to more than 4,100 skilled professionals, craftsmen, operators and support staff, of whom about 22 per cent are UAE nationals.

The company has pioneered the quality movement in Dubai, twice winning the Dubai Quality Award in the production and manufacturing sector (1996 and 2000). As well as the ISO/IEC 20000 certification, it is certified to the international quality standards ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and ISO/TS 16949. It holds the ISO/IEC 27001 certification for information security management and has achieved the OHSAS 18001 standard.

Dubal has set its sights on becoming one of the top five primary aluminium producers in the world by 2015. In pursuit of this vision, the company has begun to invest laterally in green-field smelter development projects that will leverage Dubal's experience and advanced technologies and upstream to secure the raw materials required to fuel this growth.