Posted on August 18, 2020
IHC Americas is headquartered in Houston, TX and is a subsidiary of Royal IHC, The Netherlands
DredgeWire: Adriano, could you provide us with a brief summary of IHC Americas and yourself?
Adriano/IHCA: IHC Americas is the combination between a US based subsidiary of Royal IHC, Netherlands and many business and partnerships in the Latin America countries of Brazil, Uruguay and Colombia. Within the past five years, IHC’s business has been growing in an exponential way in the region supported by a strategy to develop an optimum solutions package in close coordination with our local customers. Most of our portfolio of projects are related to dredging, oil and gas and mining markets, offering high end equipment, services and solutions to help them achieve their end business goals.
Currently and since the business start-up, I have the pleasure to be the senior executive for running all IHC Americas activities. My education background is a Bachelor of Civil Engineering together with a MBA in Business Management. I am a father of three girls supported by a fantastic wife. My experience is more than 20 years in key management positions in some large organizations, among others, GE Oil&Gas, Wellstream and Jurong shipyard. Throughout my professional life I`ve built a projects and operations background with a broad international experience in multi culture environments in the Americas, Europe and Asia.
DredgeWire: As IHCA has been in Latin America since the early 70’s, specifically Brasil. How have things changed over the years and what is your outlook?
Adriano/IHCA: Royal IHC was present since the 70`s in Latin America building dredges and equipment thru partnerships with other companies. However, since IHC Americas was incorporated in 2015, our local presence has significantly changed,and we have increased our revenue level and the volume of activities by recovering the market share from local fabricators & low technology providers. We feel that this approach of offering full solutions, including project and local fabrication, is important to keep and increase our market share and maintain a wide challenging moat for newcomers or start-ups. My view, that is the way forward for Royal IHC to keep the same business level and growth.
DredgeWire: IHCA is relatively new in the North American marketplace, what sets you apart from other competitors?
Adriano/IHCA: IHC America was founded in 1977, originally under the name DTC Dredges. IHC America Inc. is solutions provider for the maritime industry, responsible for the supply of our full line of dredge and mining products and services which includes innovative vessels, advanced equipment and life-cycle support. We are very proud of the developments and growth in the past few years in the USA, especially due to some local builds, including a full U.S. made Water Injection Dredge. Besides that, we are locally fabricating, constructing and refurbishing complex equipment like, Drag Heads & Arms, Hydraulic Systems, Tensioners, among others. We can offer our customers a wide range of standard and customized equipment, turnkey if required, as well as after-market technical and spare parts support vs. most of our competitors. Our North American operation is set up as a project-based approach to assign to our local customers a dedicated team to each project or opportunity, depending on the time, complexity and customer requirements. We have a pool of project managers under the strong leadership to choose from, who take ownership to deliver the project to the customer, as per the contract requirements. There are currently six to seven teams working on different projects in this region. Working on a project basis enables us to monitor performance, evaluate customer satisfaction, and get a better understanding of the process involved.
DredgeWire: How has COVID affected your business in the Americas?
Adriano/IHCA: Covid has heavily impacted our sales and revenue throughput in the first half of 2020, mainly due to shutdown of some of our fabrication facilities. We are implementing several strict cost measures to navigate in such critical times and maintain profitability in 2020 as it has been in the past 5 years. Liquidity and collections are also an important point of attention that we maintain a close focus.
DredgeWire: What industry trends do you see & what is the impact on your business?
Adriano/IHCA: We have seen a trend in the past few years with the industry slowly changing their mindset as to requirements the supply of equipment, vessels and solutions that are more in line with the low energy or power consumption, high end technology, big remote data collection for driving lower maintenance costs and operational efficiency. From our perspective, on the management side, we are making sure our team is more proactive, responding faster, listening and being close to the customer in order to be flexible to adapt and delivering exactly what the market needs.
DredgeWire: What new technology(ies) is IHCA offering your customers today that you did not have before & how does it benefit them?
Adriano/IHCA:Our R&D team works every day in developing and offering new technologies to the market with an objective to keep the leadership against our competitors. Our constant efficiency improvement in designing pumps, combined computational fluid dynamics and in-house testing facilities, have resulted in innovative and high efficiency dredge pumps to execute all dredging challenges. Recently we have developed some high-end technology subsea equipment for the oil & gas market, as well as providing mining solutions fully developed and lead by the local team.
DredgeWire: What are your biggest challenges?
Adriano/IHCA: The current biggest challenge is making sure that our employees are working in safe environments during the COVID crisis. We are spending a lot of time training our team in safety procedures and making sure they have the correct safety items. During this challenging environment we are also keeping our focus on continuing our growth, innovation and our customers’ needs. We believe going forward there will be opportunities for delivering a complex and large U.S. flagged TSHD/ CSD on a turnkey basis as well.
DredgeWire: What does the company do to contribute to its employee’s professional development?
Adriano/IHCA: That’s an important pillar of our business culture. This is an area that we are spending energy and constantly investing to coach, develop and raise the professional and managerial skills of our employees. One of the important aspects of our culture is to give our directors, managers and coordinators the necessary empowerment, ownership and flexibility to manage their activities chasing for the business results. Thus, we will continue to develop these leadership capabilities, maintain the project organization, and keep the customer at the center of our business
DredgeWire: What achievements has your company accomplished that you are most proud of?
Adriano/IHCA:The growth of the IHC Americas and the management from a small business to a large organization is probably one of most important achievements. We have delivered over 100 projects so far and some have been quite complex and challenging, as examples, the local build of a 4300m3 THSD vessel in Uruguay and local build stock program for standard cutters dredge (Beavers). On mining, we are delivering 4 large customized electric driven cutter dredges. On oil and gas market, we have built several subsea equipment and pump systems for managing the IWOCS (Intervention Workover Control Systems) and well intervention operations and local build of some FPSO (Floating Production Storage & Offloading) systems.
DredgeWire: Anything else that you would like to comment on?
Adriano/IHCA: I am grateful to all of our team members at IHC Americas, without whom, none of our achievements would have been possible. We will continue to build a great company that innovates and serves our customers to the best of our ability.
DredgeWire: What is your opinion of the value of DredgeWire?
Adriano/IHCA: My team and I are all daily readers of DredgeWire, as we feel it is the “go-to” source for the latest on-line dredge & marine industry news.
