“Business since we last spoke has been good for the company,” enthuses Adrok’s Managing Director, Gordon Stove. “We have been growing steadily and in the process increased our turnover for last year compared to that achieved in 2012. At the heart of this has been our ability to win more clients, and with this they have brought us fresh contracts and new sources of revenue. What that means is that at this time we are well on course to increase that turnover again for 2014, so things are going very nicely for us indeed.”
That last time we spoke which Stove refers to was in March of last year. It was then that we spoke at length about Adrok’s plans to expand its international presence in core markets, specifically the United States through the opening of a new office in Houston, Texas. This office has been operation for well over a year now and is today helping to facilitate some of Adrok’s strongest areas of growth.
“In truth we planned for a relatively slow start when it came to our activities in the US, what with it being traditionally a more conservative market,” Stove explains. “With that being said we still challenged ourselves to obtain a certain number of clients and with the two new clients we secured at the turn of the year we have already reached our targets with only a quarter of 2014 behind us. Needless to say therefore that we are quite happy with the progress we have made in this important market to date.”
In July of last year the company also made the decision to increase its presence in North America through the opening of a new Canadian office. Since then, Adrok Canada has provided the business with a base from which to service existing clients in the region and develop relationships with the country’s prosperous mineral exploration industry.
“Canada is unique in that it possesses all of the land attributes we can use to demonstrate the versatility of our Atomic Dielectric Resonance (ADR) technology and its capabilities,” Stove says. “There is ice, snow, dry areas, water and high mountainous areas all present within the country, and one of our key unique selling points is that our technology is very portable. This means that we can take our technology and survey crews into areas that other large geophysics techniques, large seismic trucks for example, won’t necessarily want or be able to go. As a company we pride ourselves on our ability to be very nimble on the ground, as it were, and that makes Canada an ideal playground for us to grow into.”
Adrok’s bases in Canada and Houston also present the company with the perfect springboard into other key regions of North America. Its Canadian office will allow the business to test the waters of markets such as Atlantic Canada, Alberta, Colorado and California, while its Houston base will allow it to target the Southern US and Central America in the months to come.
By offering a faster, cheaper and greener alternative to traditional seismic exploration methods, Adrok has been able to draw together a portfolio of clients including those specialising in geophysical exploration and research. Indeed, the company’s record for winning contracts and projects in the mining sector has continued to gather pace, however a particular area in which it has been earning more business as of late is the oil and gas sector.
“Traditionally the oil and gas sector has been very slow to adopt new methodologies or technologies, with the average timeline in this sphere being anything up to 24 years,” Stove highlights. “While we have been around for 15 years, giving us a certain degree of legitimacy, the simple fact is that we are being approached for work because we have a proven history of saving our clients money.”
What the company is doing is providing a service to its oil and gas clients before they embark on drilling programmes and Adrok’s technology is being used to guide said clients to the best places to drill for success. Additionally it is helping to reduce the number of drill holes required, thus increasing clients success rates.
“With our success to date in the oil and gas sector we have begun to turn our attention towards also getting involved in projects of our own making, almost becoming something of a pseudo oil company ourselves,” Stove reveals. “At present we are working to pick up such projects and are embarking on negotiations with several companies in the US about coming together to operate joint undertakings. It means that our business focus will increasingly turn to not just providing expert services to certain clients, but also towards taking an active interest in what we find in the ground.”
The oil and gas sector also provides the base for a field of expertise that Adrok and Stove are very excited to progress into. “I believe that a real breakthrough for the company in the near future will come from delivering advanced monitoring solutions for existing oilfields,” he says. “Within the vast majority of oil companies one will find an advanced oil recovery programme and we want to be a part of that. By installing a permanent installation in the ground, complete with our sensors and scanners, we will be able to monitor levels of oil and water in the ground, as well as steam injection, water injection and CO2 injection, which are all techniques for enhancing oil recovery. Being able to provide monitoring and surveillance services during the production phase is something we are very interested in capitalising on going forward.”
In addition to increasing its turnover last year Adrok also doubled its workforce to 25 people in 2013 and it expects both these facets of the business to continue along the same upward trajectory this year.
“Other immediate plans for ourselves include growing our bases in North America, while longer term we can work with the view of perhaps setting up a permanent presence in Australia and perhaps China, which are both markets we see great long term potential in,” Stove concludes. “In the meantime we will continue to provide our services to both existing and new clients, while increasingly utilising our technologies to identify projects of which we could ultimately become part or full owners.”
Written by Will Daynes, research by James Boyle
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