Tareq Qaddumi, CEO of SPETCO, talks to The Energy Year about key contract wins in 2025 and business expectations from Kuwait’s growing rig count and emerging offshore developments. SPETCO is a Kuwaiti engineering company and oilfield services provider specialising in EPC and build-own-operate projects.
Can you provide an update on project wins in the past 12-15 months?
The past 6-8 months have been one of the most eventful and, fortunately, fruitful periods in the company’s history. The tenders have been right down our alley. We bid on three major production facility tenders and knew we would be at the forefront of the bidding for at least two. All we wanted was the biggest, but we won two out of the three.
The biggest was KOC’s SRU [sulphur recovery unit] compression tender. It is the largest project SPETCO has ever won – a USD 428-million contract. It was a huge deal for us, but we were not in new territory – we have been involved in production facilities since 2003. The biggest challenge was finance, and I say that because we plan to bid for other tenders of that scale.
The other one was a KGOC [Kuwait Gulf Oil Company] tender, and not really down our alley because it is for installing 14 kilometres of 16-inch pipeline. Nonetheless, it was a big win because this is our first official KGOC contract. That contract is worth around USD 15 million.
The third tender was for a new gas sweetening facility, a major project that we bid for in 2017 and won, but was cancelled by CAPT [Central Agency for Public Tenders]. We were very happy to re-tender because we had done the legwork, but we lost to a ridiculously low price from an Indian contractor seeking to enter the market. When I saw their bid, I thought it was a typo. I don’t know how you sustain a company at that price.
That was a big loss, but we have our hands full with the other two, and we are more flexible because a third project would have required a lot more finance. From 2023 to 2024, our growth was 10-15%. Our total revenue in 2024 was around KWD 34 million [USD 110.5 million].
What is your approximate market share at the moment?
For oilfield services, our share is around 60%. We are still working our way into the markets for other services, such as slickline and coiled tubing. For slickline, our plan was to get qualified and team up with a well-established company to bid for projects, which we did. We pre-qualified to bid for the slickline tender with technical support from an international service provider, but we bid on the tender on our own, and we won. So, in 2025, we have the KGOC pipeline project, the SRU and a project to provide slickline and associated services
The working model for slickline is quite similar to well testing; you need a project manager, a supervisor and a crew. The supervisor and the crew we already have, but we don’t have an experienced slickline project manager, so we are going to hire one. We will recruit domestically, probably employees with experience with other international service providers.
For slickline services in Kuwait, we are primarily targeting KOC. Outside of Kuwait, we opened an office in Oman, but not for oilfield services – we bid for BOO [build-own-operate] production facility contracts. In the UAE, we were involved in offshore well testing for ADNOC until about five years ago and hope to mobilise and start bidding on projects again in 2026. At the moment, we are bidding for one of ADNOC’s production facilities and two oilfield services contracts. I would love to work in Saudi Arabia at some stage. That would be big.
KOC plans to increase the active rig count from 172 to around 212. What opportunities do you see for SPETCO in this context?
Whenever we hear that more wells are going to be developed, the first thing we think of is the number of wells we can receive for testing, and how we must grow our operations.
Well testing is a per-unit business. You have to send a separator to each well to test the units, and the more wells there are, the larger the investment, as you have to procure more equipment and hire more people, which means more cost. This is where AI can kick in; there are technologies that we have to start pursuing aggressively to gain in efficiency and keep up with all the new business.
One of the most exciting narratives in Kuwait at the moment is offshore development. How is SPETCO positioned in this segment?
We are very excited about Kuwait’s offshore developments because, as soon as the wells are developed and ready, well testing comes next, and KOC knows us very well for well testing. In addition to that, I’m not sure that any Kuwaiti companies have done well testing offshore, and we have experience from working with ADNOC. We have been doing it for 10 years.
We will look at developing other services that we can provide offshore. The discoveries are quite recent, and it could take up to five years before development is fully under way.
Source: Theenergyyear.com