ECM wins $110m worth of Pilbara contracts

Electrical contractor EC&M Global Project Partners has signed two contracts for work on the Roy Hill and Sino Iron projects in the Pilbara worth $110 million collectively.

The electrical and instrumentation contracts will provide a significant boost to ECM’s order book this finanancial year as well as adding "a healthy amount" to next financial year's revenue.

ECM managing director and chief executive Simon Higgins said he expected ECM to make $230 million in revenue this financial year.

Mr Higgins said ECM had begun a recruitment process to hire about 350 people for work on the two iron ore projects, which are expected to run for about 45 weeks each.

ECM currently has 850 people working across the country.

The Roy Hill contract under Thiess involves electrical instrumentation works to construct the mine process plant facilities.

Thiess has been ECM’s contractor for electrical instrumentation work on the QCLNG project on Curtis Island, off Gladstone, over the past 18 months.

In Western Australia ECM has a contract with Chevron’s Wheatstone liquefied natural gas project and runs a maintenance and capital works business for iron ore producers out of Port Hedland.

ECM’s electrical instrumentation contract for Sino Iron is directly with its owner CITIC Pacific Mining and follows ECM being recently awarded work on a dewatering building scope at the magnetite project from the Chinese company.

Mr Higgins said in the past four years ECM had deliberately grown its business, following opportunities largely in Queensland, where it also has a contract with engineering group Bechtel to provide electrical instrumentation work at the Australian Pacific LNG project on Curtis Island.

“I think we probably thought the real buoyant times in WA were not going to last forever, so they’re the times to make yourself a better business,” he said.

“I think the market is very competitive at the moment, but the competition comes and goes and there are people like us who have been doing it for nearly thirty years.”

“You can make your business stronger in circumstances like this, rather than worrying about how competitive it is."

Mr Higgins said signing contracts for large projects increasingly required months of advance preparation and creating relationships with potential clients.

“We’ve been dealing with and pricing different options on Roy Hill for the past two-and-a-half years. We find that although we’re only announcing the result now the early contractor involvement is very commonplace these days so we work with the clients and the engineers to help them develop their feasibility,” he said.

“We spent 29 years becoming an overnight success, because it takes that long to create the appropriate talent within your business to be able to deliver on that scale of project. You can’t just turn your capacities on and off again.”