Schneider Electric is aiming at transforming how people and organizations consume energy, better automate industrial processes, and increase the quality of business decisions, while improving their lives — explained the company’s Country President – Gulf Countries & Pakistan, Benoit Dubarle, in a conversation with Akshay Bhatnagar and Bibhu Pattnaik.
Which verticals have been the focus areas for Schneider Electric in the GCC region and why?
Schneider Electric has grown significantly in the past 10 years through organic growth and acquisitions. We have been able to compete in each portfolio of products in order to propose value added solutions to a certain number of verticals and to the customers directly. We are investing five percent of our sales into R&D to develop products and solutions to serve the customers.
In the gulf region, we have chosen six key verticals where we see huge opportunity for us. These are the segments where we at Schneider can bundle our solutions and expertise into a unique vertical proposition.
The first vertical is oil and gas. In the region, we have the capabilities to tackle the full energy management of this type of segment through information technology and software to be able to produce and refine oil in the most efficient manner.
Second segment is water. The GCC region has one of the world’s most water consuming countries. And here as well, we are perfectly positioned to provide the utilities with state-of-the-art solutions linking operational technology and information technology to distribute and produce clean water in the most efficient way.
The third segment is utilities. We have major voltage equipment which are the major requirement of the utility companies. So we are partnering with all the utility companies across the region.
The fourth vertical is healthcare. There is a huge need for healthcare services in this region. We have been involved in a lot of flagship healthcare projects in the GCC. We are quite unique because we are able to provide reliability of the energy in an environment where it is critical not to have any energy shut down in order to save life.
The fifth vertical is data centre. There are a lot of data centres coming up in the region. We are the worldwide leader in data centres thanks to the acquisition of APC by us several years ago. Now we are able to provide full turnkey data centre solutions including UPS, the full energy management of the data centre, the cooling and energy inputs to the data centre which are critical in this type of application.
The last but not the least important segment for us is hospitality. There is a lot of investment in hotel industry from a number of international chains in this region. We have big ticket events including Fifa Cup in Qatar and Expo 2020 in Dubai coming up and as result many countries in the region are gearing up on the hospitality side.
Through these six segments we aim to bring value to the end users in the region. These six segments are creating differentiation at a level of city where we are putting the smart city element. This is about bringing energy to the cloud and the data connection to the cloud. We have the software to connect these data connections from each vertical at the level of a city and to make cities smarter. We are deeply involved to make that in most of the cities including Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Oman.
Tell us about the recent acquisitions and partnerships undertaken by Schneider, which are helping you to strengthen the foothold and portfolio expansion in the GCC region.
Globally, we have an extensive product and equipment portfolio and evolved from a product company to a global solutions company in the past ten years. It has been made possible partly through several acquisitions. The big one was APC several years ago which has a worldwide speciality in UPS and data centre. UPS systems are essential in energy sector for critical applications.
In 2014, we acquired Invensys, the leading industry automation and software specializing in oil & gas solutions. The company is very active in oil and gas, water and also in large infrastructure companies where top level software is implemented.
We are increasingly focusing on companies which are strong in operational and IT where we can connect our equipment to the web and to the cloud, and being able to have data that helps the end users and consumers.
