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Home > GERMANY > Rampenlicht
SOCOTHERM, ZENO SOAVE'S 'SMALL MULTINATIONAL'
SOCOTHERM, ZENO SOAVE'S 'SMALL MULTINATIONAL' Everything started in the middle of the 19th century, when Zenone Soave founded a company for the manufacturing and application of asphalt for civilian purposes. After four generations, Zenone Eugenio Soave - better known as Zeno - decided to take a risk, and branched out into the niche industry of steel piping protection. Founded in the 1970s, the Socotherm group (www.socotherm.com/index.php) - whose President and CEO is Zeno Soave himself - is today one of the major firms in the world supplying covering materials for piping used for the extraction and transport of oil, gas and water, as well as main supplier of thermal-insulation materials for piping used for deep oil exploration.
Mr President, how did you come to the decision to move your company into uncharted waters?
Thirty or forty years ago an expanding oil industry needed to protect its pipes against corrosion. The Soave company had expertise in the asphalt industry and started to use it for piping protection. It then moved on to polyurethane until it developed in-house new state-of-the-art solutions for the thermal-insulation of fuel transport pipes. At the start of the Seventies our presence was limited to Italian markets, but in just a little more than three decades we have turned into a 'small multinational' that is active all over the world. Today Italy only counts for about 10% of our turnover, which in 2006 grew by 8% compared to 2005, reaching 280 million euros.
How did a firm like Socotherm, which at the start could not count on the size, strength or know-how that it currently enjoys, find success on the international markets?
There are two ways to expand abroad: going it alone or forging links with local partners. Socotherm has always preferred joint-ventures: developing synergies allowed us to make up for our lack of competences in certain sectors such as logistics, commercial networks and 'political' knowledge of the local market.
Your development model, therefore, is based on local joint ventures, while the nerve centre of your company continues to be in Italy, in the Veneto region. Don't you run the risk, however, of losing control of the overall vision of your global outlook?
Absolutely not. The management staff is necessarily local, chosen and sent by us from Italy, or locally sourced. But the overall coordination remains in Italy and is the prerogative of the holding company. Yet our company does not have a 'pyramidal' structure; we rather talk about a 'platform' for consultations. Together we develop our strategic plans and our development strategies which are then applied locally by our outsourcing partners.
Socotherm has recently inaugurated a new outsourced factory for the manufacturing of protection materials for 'deep water' pipes, which are used for oil extraction in deep sea waters, beyond 500 meters below sea level. What are the development opportunities for this sector?
Open sea oil extraction is increasingly predominant today, not only because offshore reserves are less exploited, but also because there is greater protection from terrorist attacks compared with dry land plants. There is a tendency to get further and further away from the coast and to dig ever deeper, down to 2,000-3,000 meters under the sea, where oil has a temperature between 80 to 100 degrees. In order to pump it up to sea level the pipes need to withstand high pressures and to keep the oil warm to prevent it from becoming viscous once it reaches the platform, due to the difference in temperature. In the last five years we developed a new exclusive technology which gives us a leading position in the deep sea exploration sector: it is called "wetisokote®" and is manufactured using modified polypropylene and empty glass caves. We recently opened a new factory in Luanda, Angola, which is the first and only plant for the protection of deep water pipes.
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