SAMI's South African Operations are becoming well established. We have just completed a successful multi-year assignment at Sasol’s Synfuels Facility in Secunda where we embedded a new Asset Healthcare Work Management Process culminating in all business units attaining Stage 1 Certification. We have begun the establishment of the pro-active Stage 2 processes and results are accruing. Our Production Team has collaboratively redesigned Synfuel’s Stage 1 approach to operations management which Sasol will begin to install at the beginning of 2007. Our second major project is in Sasolburg, Sasol’s huge multi-plant chemical production operations. This project has completed the Strategic Planning and Design phases of our Asset Healthcare offering and is well into the installation of the new processes. Embedding the processes will continue into the fall of 2007 at which time we will being the planning phase for a Stage 2 intervention.

With our work becoming known across the country, we are currently in active discussions with a variety of major South African companies from the metals, mining and utility industries. Our long term strategy for South Africa now that we have established an office in Pretoria is to develop a cadre of local professionals to continue our work targeting basic process industries and to become a fully registered South African entity within the next eighteen months. Our teams now contain about fifty-percent excellent South African senior consultants that have been and are being trained in our methods of change management and process application. The future for SAMI looks very bright as the industrial profile of the country is heavy industry and we see that there is a significant need for improved productivity due to the severe shortage of skilled artisans across this industrial landscape. With the current prices being commanded for basic commodities at an all-time high, reliability of the nation’s industrial equipment infrastructure significantly adds to the greater need for world-class Asset Healthcare, Production and Logistics Processes. Loss of reliability is quickly translated into significant losses in revenue. We can assist any company in improving both these cost and revenue issues. 

In the last few years many industrial companies in the Arabian Gulf and Gulf Corporation Council (GCC) have begun to realize the importance of Strategic Asset Management (SAM) as an enterprise strategy that, properly implemented, will result in Sustained Business Performance Improvement (SBPI).  Typical results of an effective Strategic Plan for Asset Management include a 20% - 50% reduction in maintenance cost accompanied by a 15% - 20% increase in real capacity, with no capital investment in production equipment.  The tangible results include a significant increase in profitability accompanied by a dramatic reduction in unit cost.

In order to understand the impact of this phenomenon, one must first get a grasp of the culture and history of the region.  Most of you probably know the Arabian Gulf as the Persian Gulf.  However, in the region and especially among the oil producing countries, it is known as the Arabian Gulf.  Most of these countries are monarchies with government and industry controlled by various royal families.  In recent years there has developed a very strong move toward privatization of the local industries.

Recent events in the global crude oil market with increasing industrialization and demand from China and India have resulted in a significant influx of capital into the region.  We believe that SAMI can make a significant contribution to the future success of the Gulf Region’s global development and business growth.  Indeed, we can have an impact on the industrial performance of the entire Arabian Gulf Region.

SAMI has offices in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and Manama, Bahrain and is active in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, and Bahrain and has a business plan to employ, train and develop capable consultants from the GCC Countries as our business develops in the region. 

SAMI is committed to increasing our visibility and influence in the rapidly expanding Canadian oil and gas industries.  With our strong background in providing Asset Management Consulting services to both Upstream and Downstream companies in a global marketplace, we believe that Canada will be a rapid growth area for our services.

We have existing business relationships with companies such as Imperial Oil and Husky Energy and are actively pursuing initiatives with other major Canadian companies. 

The enormous resources and predicted growth in the Alberta Oil Sands region provide SAMI with limitless growth opportunity in that area.  

We have found strong interest in our services in Europe in the past several years, and have proposals pending with several manufacturing leaders in central and northern Europe.  Our message or integrated operations improvements is particularly interesting to Europeans, who spend much time understanding the SAMI models of improvement and our triangles, becoming sold first on the proprietary capabilities SAMI brings, and secondly our outstanding results.

In May 2007 SAMI opened an office in Melbourne, in the south eastern State of Victoria. Strong interest in SAMI’s knowledge transfer offerings followed and we were rewarded mid year with an order from a significant public company for a full four faceted Assessment – Logistics, Asset Health Care, Production and Capacity. The Assessment was followed immediately by an order to start Implementing SAMI’s recommendations at seven (7) different sites. On the back of this, SAMI has now opened a project office in Townsville, in the north eastern State of Queensland.

Since the opening of the Australian office, interest in SAMI’s services has been high, and we expect a number of high visibility clients to join us shortly.

We expect that as we gain traction with global companies, we will be introduced to their Asian operations.  Indeed this is already happening.  Asia is much more a discrete manufacturing operations economy than process industries (which are nonetheless fully interesting to SAMI), and we expect that as we further develop our discrete manufacturing practice, our case studies and expertise will allow us to intensify our efforts to work in Asia.  China and India are economies that must be addressed in the near future.