Notwithstanding contracts Qatar Galvanising Company has received for high-profile projects in the country, the work in hand still falls way short of its plant’s production capacity, it says.

The company hopes the industrial climate in Qatar will improve radically so it can receive a great deal more orders for its galvanising services and utilise more plant capacity than the 30 per cent it now handles.

The situation will likely improve with projects related to the 2022 Fifa World Cup but it believes any orders stemming from it will not be forthcoming for some time. In the meantime Qatar Galvanising hopes entrepreneurs in the state will set up plants and try to catch up with the industrial tempo prevailing in neighbouring Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

The company is taking a step forward on its own by announcing plans to set up a plant to manufacture guard rails. 'This will be backward integration,' said a company official. The project is in the conceptual stage and no firm decision has been taken on plant capacity. There will be quick thinking in the next few weeks and Qatar Galvanising hopes the bureaucratic wheels move fast and it will be able to complete all procedures for commissioning to begin by the end of next year.

The guard rails that the proposed plant will manufacture will also keep staff and equipment busy at Qatar Galvanising, a prospect that officials and staff are relishing at a time when business is not as brisk as they would have liked it to be.

Still, Qatar Galvanising is at work on the Pearl Qatar project and will be at the job for around six months. It will also keep working at least for another six months at Qatar Foundation, a year at the World Trade Centre, two months at the new Doha International Airport and six months at the Kahramaa expansion.

There is every likelihood that contractors at some or all these projects will grant Qatar Galvanising new contracts for additional work. 'The main challenge is the lack of major projects involving galvanising requirements,' said the official. 'We do not have major fabricators or upstream feeding companies such as manufacturers of cable trays and lighting poles to feed such a big-capacity galvanising plant,' he added. Qatar Galvanising has a capacity of 50,000 tonnes annually.

The company is a joint venture between Al Mana Group of Qatar and All Metals Group of the UAE with the Qatari party holding 51 per cent of the shares. Qatar Galvanising has its quality management system certified by TUV SUD Management Services for the ISO 9001:2009 mark and galvanising is carried out to ASTM’s A 123, BS, EN and ISO 1461-1999 standards.

Facilities

The company has facilities for abrasive blast cleaning (an auto blaster and a manual blasting machine), pre-treatment (tanks for degreasing, water rinsing, pickling, rinsing after pickling and pre-flux-zinc ammonioum chloride solution), drying (an oven 13 m long, 4.6 m wide and 4.4 m high) and post-galvanising treatment (a water quenching tank and a tank for di-chromating). Its hot dip galvanising zinc kettle is 13 m long, 1.6 m wide and 3 m deep. The company also has two Goliath cranes of 10-tonne capacity in the pre-treatment area, three hoists of 10-capacity on the monorail system in the galvanising area above the zinc kettle, four fork lifts of 5-tonne capacity and two forklifts of three-tonne capacity.