Subsea and Offshore Solutions from the Middle East

Unique Maritime Group, headquartered in Sharjah, UAE, is one of the world’s leading integrated turnkey subsea and offshore solution providers. Through its expanding network of companies, UMG is a specialist in the provision of services, and the sale and rental of equipment for the marine, diving, hydrographic, oceanographic, and NDT market sectors.

Unique Maritime Group was founded by Harry Gandhi on 6 January, 1993 in the UAE. Unique System, as the group was first known, was established as an equipment rental sales and service organisation, providing specialised products and services to the offshore oil, natural gas and maritime industries in the Middle East, India and Singapore. As the group evolved, Unique System began operations in the US, UK and India, resulting in a new holding name being adopted – Unique Maritime Group.

Core Business

UMG provides quality products and services to its customers worldwide and aims to build a dedicated team of employees with a passion to provide the best customer support and technical services. We are committed to building passionate and equitable partnerships with our suppliers and partners. UMG hopes to build a profitable business and create sustainable growth.

Unique Maritime provides a wide range of services and products. These include a wide range of marine solutions for the offshore, subsea and merchant maritime industries for both topside and subsea applications. Unique Maritime provides survey equipment rental and sales and we specialise in design, engineering, service, and supply of diving related equipment and services, including the manufacturing of containerised air dive systems and modular saturation systems.

Unique Wellube FZC provides specialist engineering services and products to a diverse range of industries, directed at maintaining plant operability. Unique Computer Systems, a part of UMG, offers e-transformation solutions and is a complete internet and wireless business solutions provider. Through rental pool investment, the company ensures that state of the art solutions are available to clients to support various applications. Unique Maritime also offers a wide range of NDT and inspection equipment.

Management Philosophy
We believe the success of our clients is our success. The relationship with our clients is based on a simple philosophy where we believe in achieving their objectives by providing quality products and services in accordance with their requirements. The nature of UMG’s engineers, their innovative capabilities, along with the financial stability UMG enjoys allow the company to fulfill its clients’ requirements, while having the willingness to take risks in challenging projects and providing tailor made solutions based on their requirements.
The culture at Unique is driven by its values of Loyalty, Passion, Responsibility, Effort, Community and Collaboration which are passed on from the management to all levels of staff.
Our approach is employee driven and the training programmes benefit the company as it leads to the personal development of the employee. We have 3 types of training programmes, namely in-house training, outbound training and on the job training.

International and Global Scope
The Group employs over 500 people worldwide. The Group sales grew by 12% in 2011 compared to 2010, with an annual turnover of USD 90 million.
We provide services to a wide range of customers starting from the Oil and Gas sector, to Marine, Survey Companies, Diving, Government, Environmental, Fisheries, Ports and Harbours, Universities and many more including offering turnkey solutions for monitoring of environment and customised projects.

We target the global market with 20+ offices worldwide. The nature of our business is such that we need to understand the needs of the customer very closely in order to offer a complete solution. In this way we can tailor make solutions depending on the challenges they are facing.

Unique is registered with UAE’s Sea and Air port authorities in Dubai & Sharjah including roadways (border customs) and has an import/export code.

Looking Ahead
The key challenges in this industry are timely and specialised technical support, people retention and technical knowhow. Our engineers are all trained to manufacturer standards. We constantly invest in our employees and thus our qualified engineers with many years of field experience give us the competitive advantage in this challenging environment.

Our market place is highly competitive. The market demand is closely linked to Global Oil & Gas related activities and the scenario varies globally based on economic and political situations. For instance, the marine activities in the offshore segment are presently positive while the merchant segment has been badly hit by the global economic shockwaves.

Research and development is very important in our industry where the technological developments are continual and we aim to ensure that we supply our customers with the latest technology available to meet their needs in a competitive commercial environment. UMG has a complete research and development team in place for their diving products. The company launched an additional product for the diving industry. The investment is substantial and the company manages this from a new office in Russia. Discussing some of the technological advances employed in the business, Ian Huggins , general manager, Unique System FZE says: “UMG is bringing about a revolution in the diving industry with the launch of a new system – the Umbilical Supplied Rebreather.”

Though recent times have been challenging, UMG’s growth strategy has helped the company prosper in these turbulent economic times. UMG is cost conscious in delivering value to our customers without compromising on quality. In 2013, we are optimistic that we will see an increase in our product and service offerings in the Middle East market. We are continually on the lookout for new products to expand our inventory and complement our existing portfolio. Our vision for the next 5 years is to build a company that is renowned for its knowledge & technology based solutions and recognised worldwide for its excellence and quality of service to the subsea and maritime industries.

The company has recently acquired Seaflex , Hydra and Corrintec. It has signed joint ventures with, among other, Kongsberg Maritime Middle East DMCCO, Sea & Land Technologies Pte. Ltd, and Compass Petroleum Services. As a system integrator we are pleased to have also added new principals to our portfolio, enabling us to offer additional products and services to an existing network of customers.