Gulf Construction Online - DS Brown appoints UAE partner

UAE Focus

DS Brown and Emirates Specialities officials ... new partnership.

DS Brown appoints UAE partner

01 May 2013

DS BROWN Singapore, a leading worldwide designer, supplier and manufacturer of engineered products for the bridge and highway industry, has appointed Emirates Specialities, part of the Bardawil Group, as its exclusive representative in the UAE.

The contract, which was signed in March this year, marks DS Brown’s repositioning into the UAE market.

Commenting on the prospects of the new partnership, Kandikattu Sreenivasa Prasad (Vasu), director of DS Brown Singapore, said: “We are pleased and excited with this new venture and we are very happy with the way Emirates Specialities organises and executes the whole sales and marketing process; and with their professional approach. We expect that this joint venture will go a long way.”

“Now that the market is picking up, we felt it was the right time to re-establish ourselves and gear up for the next wave of construction activity in the four or five years and hopefully Dubai will get the 2020 Expo,” he added.

Iskandar Bendaly, general sales manager for Emirates Specialities, welcomed the addition of DS Brown to the company’s portfolio of high-quality, high-value principals saying: “We are very happy with the new association with DS Brown and we are certain we will thrive together and benefit a lot from this association. DS Brown will fit into our specialist building materials division and our sales people will be visiting sites and offices on their behalf.

“We will also support the venture with our specification department which works with consultants and authorities to push and specify the products and manufacturers that we represent.”

DS Brown first entered the UAE in 2001, dealing with major clients such as Dubai’s Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) and Abu Dhabi Municipality and supplied bridge bearings and bridge expansion joints to its TRIP projects since 2001. Notable references include the supply of expansion joints for Musaffah Bridge and Salaam Street underpass in Abu Dhabi.

According to Vasu, DS Brown’s speciality lies in highly engineered bearings and joints for bridges, where “each bearing and expansion joint is custom built and designed for that specification”.

The Helix Bridge ... a key project.

“There are two key components to the engineering and design of a high quality bearing or joint,” Vasu continued. “One is the performance design – for the loads, movements, rotations etc – the other is the material specification which is equally important.

“We work with the authorities to get both inputs and we come up with the best, most cost-effective, and technically superior solution.”

Emirates Specialities will be supported by DS Brown’s research and development teams in Singapore and the US. DS Brown’s testing centre in Singapore has one of the largest test facilities for bridge bearings in the world, featuring a fully-computerised test machine that can test for vertical loads of up to 80,000 kN.

In addition to bridge bearings, DS Brown also manufactures bearings for the offshore oil industry. Recently, it has supplied 16 bearings including 2.4-m-diameter/24-tonne bearing with a vertical load capacity of 72,000 kN for an offshore installation in Malaysia to Shell/Petronas. These bearings were totally designed, manufactured and tested in DS Brown’s Singapore facility by the technical team led by its managing director, Ravinder Grover. Another notable reference project is Singapore’s famous Helix Bridge, a stainless steel pedestrian bridge spanning Marina Bay, where DS Brown supplied stainless steel bearings capable of taking rotation under uplift condition with a unique anchoring mechanism.

In addition to bridge and highway expansion joints, DS Brown supplies specialist polyurethane concrete and Neoprene seals for airport runways and taxiways, bridges and highways. This elastomeric rubberised concrete is compressible and will not crush under load but will regain its original shape after compression. It can be poured and is self-levelling and is able to withstand a full load and accept traffic within one hour of pouring.

These products have been used extensively at Al Safran, Minhad and Al Dhafra airbases and Dubai International Airport in the UAE.