Pioneers of digital manufacturing in the Middle East

UAE

Fahmi Al Shawwa, founder and CEO of Immensa, talks to The Energy Year about the large potential savings that can be achieved by digitising and localising the production of spare parts and the challenges of establishing an international network of top-tier manufacturers. Immensa is a digital manufacturing company that offers digitisation, digital warehousing and on-demand production services.

What is Immensa’s value proposition and approach to making spare parts supply chains more efficient?
We have realised that there is a very big problem in most supply chains. If you look at upstream and downstream companies, power generation companies, and even power distribution companies to some extent, you see that they are sitting on massive amounts of mechanical spare parts, very basic things. Nobody in the world sits on as many spare parts as the energy industry. From a business perspective, when you sit on spare parts, you are locking up cash.
Equinor in Norway has said publicly a few times that, at any given point in time, they have over USD 2.2 billion in spare parts sitting in warehouses. They do it because oil and gas is a very sensitive sector. If there’s a breakdown or an operational interruption, you’re talking about revenue losses in the hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour.
However, holding such large inventories directly impacts their cash flow. It’s the Achilles heel of the energy sector because, even as efficient as supply chains are, it still takes a long time to get the spare parts needed.
We realised that, with the right technology, you can produce parts in record time locally. When countries closed during the pandemic, supply chains were hit, and companies were left without parts. After the pandemic, the closing of the Suez Canal disrupted almost 20% of the world’s shipping and broke supply chains again.
By utilising new manufacturing methods, you can produce spare parts locally or regionally. Through digitisation, we provide companies with the freedom to choose how they procure their spare parts.

How do your digitisation services work?
The way our platform works is that we come in and digitise a client’s spare parts, creating a virtual warehouse for the company. We have control and ownership of the data to ensure quality and provide accountability, and we give the client access to the platform so that they can manufacture with the producers we have qualified.
This system gives them the security and the comfort that, in case of certain situations, they will have access to the part. They can either produce it locally or source it. This capability can even be used to negotiate replacement prices with OEMs or other conventional manufacturers.
OEMs can also benefit from our technology. For instance, an OEM in North America may be contracting their manufacturing in Asia and then flying the parts to the Middle East. That complex chain can be simplified.
We can also help OEMs control the leakage of parts and the competition they face from aftermarket parts produced by other manufacturers. If they digitise and localise manufacturing, they can still own the value chain and make money off it. The alternative is to set up manufacturing facilities in the markets where they sell, and that is very cost-heavy.
Currently, we’re qualified by at least five global OEMs. We are going through qualification with another six, and we expect to have at least 11 by early 2025. We are convinced that digital solutions will become our most important revenue source in the coming years.

Who are your main clients and what markets do you cater to?
Although the oil and gas sector is typically very lethargic in adopting new technologies, the acceptance of this kind of solution has picked up rapidly over the past 18 months. Of the top 100 largest companies in the sector, whether OEMs or oil producers, at least half of them have considered or tried 3D printing or advanced manufacturing to some extent. We’re still just scratching the surface.
Today, the UAE represents the biggest share of our revenues, followed by Saudi Arabia. In 2023, the UAE accounted for 50% of our business. Now our client base is diversifying. The number of clients we have in the UAE is increasing, but the UAE is decreasing as a share of our overall business because we’re opening up in more markets. Most of our clients are refineries, but we also have multi-year contracts with three of Aramco’s gas plants and we are seeing more business from the utilities and power generation segments.
We work with different ADNOC entities. We work with SLB. We also have PDO in Oman and KNPC in Kuwait. They were the first company we worked with. We are very well cemented in the region and, with our current trajectory, our business volumes will justify opening a facility in Oman by the end of 2025.
We are also expanding globally. We are in advanced discussions in Egypt, Nigeria and Kazakhstan, and we also plan to return to Iraq. We collaborate with Shell operations all around the globe, and we also have good relations with ConocoPhillips. 2025 will be our year for establishing operations abroad, including in the US.

What will be your strategy to penetrate those markets?
Penetration is the billion-dollar question that we’re continuously tackling and retackling. A lot of what you see about Immensa has been pull from our customers rather than push from us. Now, we are starting to focus on pushing. We thought the market would need another two years to understand our offerings, and we were taken by surprise last year when companies started contacting us to say they wanted our solution.
In 2025, we are going to focus a lot more on building strategic partnerships. We are in talks with two global companies that are looking at rolling out Immensa across their facilities and incorporating it into their portfolio of solutions

What are the major challenges you will need to tackle in 2025?
To take our platform to the next level, we need to build a global supplier network. This means we need to enable and certify third parties to produce parts. With workshops in Nigeria, Oman, Mexico, Brazil and elsewhere supplying spare parts to the market, it is difficult to qualify manufacturers and their parts. The market needs more control and structure because, even though the standards are there, it is very cumbersome and costly to apply them. That is why we like to work with DNV, the Norwegian certification company.
Our objective is to have at least 90 approved suppliers around the world that can guarantee our OEM customers that their parts will meet their standards. Building this strategic supplier network is the key for Immensa to become the largest digital warehouse and supplier of spare parts for the energy sector in the world. We’re not aiming to do it in 10 years – we want to achieve it in four.

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