"The laboriousness of the supply of valves and piping parts continues to grow, but the same cannot be said about the margin," says Zbyněk Kalina, Chairman of the Board of Directors and General Director of Moravia Systems as, who is a traditional supplier, manufacturer and service company. for fittings and piping parts. Last year, it succeeded with fittings and piping in Iraq, has been working at nuclear power plants for a long time and has also successfully started designing and engineering.
How did the market of industrial valves change?
At first glance, industrial valves are a simple commodity. However, if we consider the development of this market, the complexity and duration of tenders for decisions is increasing in the supply of valves for large projects. Technical annexes to tenders and contract negotiations are extensive and often exceed one hundred pages. Finding in them the exact technical conditions for each item of our delivery is very challenging and with a great risk of oversight and omission. Often these attachments contain links to other and other documents that we need to find or track. Also the workload has increased significantly, especially in the required documentation and interim reports.
What major contracts did you work on last year?
Last year's biggest contract was the supply of fittings and pipes for the construction of the Basrah refinery in Iraq. Our service work during the shutdown in the Slovnaft refinery and a number of other supplies to energy and chemical plants abroad, deliveries to sewage treatment plants and Czech refineries were also extensive and demanding. How has competition and contract margins been developing in recent years? Regrettably, we cannot say that the increased workload would be rewarded with a higher margin. In the Czech and Slovak Republics, there is a lot of competition in our industry and prices are being pushed to a very low level. We believe that our competitors have the same finding.
Also has the pressure on the speed of delivery increased significantly, how did you react to it and do you see too much risk and risk?
We can confirm that there is also often a pressure on delivery time for demanding tenders and contracting negotiations. It forces us to begin implementing our own processes and negotiations and contracting with subcontractors in a very short time, especially if they are not stock items. Time tensions pose a risk of overlooking some of the terms of the main contract when they are transferred to individual operations or subcontracts. If you are in time pressure when dealing with subcontractors, this is a significant negotiating disadvantage. We have to deal with this situation and, if possible, better than our competitors.
Where do you see an increase in interesting orders?
We'll keep this to ourselves.
You have also started designing and engineering, how satisfied are you with the performance so far and which projects are you targeting?
We consider it a shift of our company in the right direction and we have already managed to realize both the orders for engineering and the supply of technological equipment designed by us.
What are your key customers in the Czech Republic? What development of power market do you expect?
It is not possible to prefer or pinpoint specific customers, because their influence on our turnover varies in individual years according to the investments made in the construction or to the large ones.reconstruction. They are certainly all refineries and petrochemical plants, power plants (excluding wind and photovoltaic), chemical plants, heating plants, sewage treatment plants, part of the food industry and basically all industrial plants if they have hot water, gas, electricity or steam.
The full article in the Czech language can be found in the appendix.