Booyco Engineering entered 2014 fully geared to stake its claim in the international air conditioning systems market. This follows a focused investment programme that has seen the company significantly extend its engineering resources, both in terms of factory capacity and personnel capability.

“With a growing engineering department, we have the potential for real business growth in the months and years ahead,” Jeremy Pougnet, CEO of Booyco Engineering, says. “We are invested in human capital – we have the expertise and know-how — and our sub-contractors are invested in capital equipment. So between us we deliver a complete solution. We’ve been positioning ourselves for a number of very large projects for some time and it’s very exciting to know our company is being seriously considered for these prospects.”

Established in 1985, Booyco Engineering is a South African company specialising in the design, development and manufacture of custom made and specialised air conditioning systems for special applications.

“In recent times there’s been a definite shift in our market,” Pougnet remarks. “One reason for this is that there are not too many military projects coming through the domestic market and therefore our emphasis has been on growing our exports. However, projects continue to emerge from the railways sector and we’re currently working on four major locomotive projects for the domestic market and one massive international coach project.

“Another factor affecting the market has arisen from the economic downturn in Europe and America, which has caused several large and long established railway air conditioner suppliers in these regions to set their sights on projects coming out of South Africa. These projects are significant by world standards and we’re experiencing a substantial increase in competition for our domestic market. As a result, we’ve brought additional engineering expertise on board to be able to handle these big projects in terms of design capability and qualification testing, as well as managing all the complex reference standards and specification documentation that goes with it.  This extraordinary level of complexity has meant we have to apply double the amount of engineering resources to any given project, compared to previous years, to produce the same hardware, because it’s being delivered to such exacting standards.”

Booyco Engineering’s investment into upgrading its factory includes enhancing the factory layout, facilities, test equipment and staff training in a phased approach.

During 2013, the company won a contract from a major Chinese locomotive builder and Pougnet says this undertaking has proved to be a major success from a strategic perspective, because it was won against international competition from an overseas locomotive builder and to a higher specification level than Transnet has traditionally required the company to design and manufacture to in the past.

“We were on time with our deliveries to China and the customer was extremely happy with the product and with our performance in general,” Pougnet comments. “Also in 2013 we delivered an export order to one of the major European defence contractors, to a very high level of specification, and received a contract for repeat business for the export of a military system to a customer in Singapore. In addition, we were appointed by an erstwhile customer of ours in Germany to supply ship air conditioning systems. The success of these projects has strongly positioned us to be considered for similar imminent projects.

“These were significant successes within a really tough year. We’re enjoying broad recognition from the market for being serious about making good on our commitments and have produced some very good designs, particularly for the Singapore project, where our engineers really excelled themselves.

“We put in a massive effort to build relationships with our customers and we try to be proactive, to anticipate what the customer wants. I think it is abundantly clear to our customers that we are extremely tenacious and determined to resolve any issues that arise.”