Jeyco not anchored to domestic market

LOCAL mooring and rigging producer Jeyco will seek investors later this year as part of its push into the lucrative military and oil and gas markets.

Jeyco’s turnover has increased 360 per cent since managing director Simon Taylor and his wife, Carolyn O’Shea, bought the company three years ago. Turnover lifted to $2.7 million during the past financial year.

Mr Taylor said this growth was largely due to the success of several of Jeyco’s products, which include a lightweight foldable anchor, the Stingray.

Mr Taylor said the company hoped to attack the lucrative military and offshore markets but required an injection of capital to do this.

“In mooring there are different levels. There is the Rottnest-type mooring, commercial mooring and the offshore oil industry. The military sits in between commercial and off-shore oil. We want to get into the military and offshore industries,” he said.

“To do that we will need an injection of capital.

“We are taking advice from consultants. At the moment we are investigating avenues for raising capital.”

The company developed the Stingray anchor four years ago and has sold the product in Hong Kong, Spain and Mexico.

The Stingray is a lightweight foldable anchor that cuts significant freight costs to customers, Mr Taylor said.

He said the company originally looked for an anchor product that could cut freight costs.

“We looked around for different anchors and found some in Europe that had a reduced weight and high holding powers,” Mr Taylor said.

“We wanted to distribute them but they [European companies] didn’t want to play ball.”

This prompted Mr Taylor and his team of engineers decided to build their own anchor, so they set about designing the Stingray.

“We wanted to create an anchor that could drive deep into the soil as quickly as it could. We took the view that the soil flows past the anchor, not around it. It’s the same as the air going through the wing of an aeroplane,” Mr Taylor said.

“We knew that to get this thing as deep as we can we had to reduce the resistance to the soil. We created an anchor with a wide opening so the soil goes through the anchor rather than around it.”

Jeyco also designed the Stingray so it could be folded and easily assembled on site.

 “We don’t know any others that fold. Our shape is very different,” Mr Taylor said.

“If a customer buys 50 anchors it may weight 25 tonnes, but because it folds it all fits on two pallets.”

He said the anchor’s design gave it a greater holding capacity than conventional anchors.

There are now 2,500 Stingrays in service around the globe.

Mr Taylor said one customer claimed to have saved $122,000 in the first year of using the Stingray.

“The Stingray was cheaper and the cost to freight it was cheaper,” he said.

Jeyco has also designed mooring buoys that are one-tenth the weight and half of the cost of conventional buoys.