From our archive series: Blasts from the Past

FEW, AT THE SERENE POOLSIDE EVENT at the Hotel Ivoire in pre-war Abidjan, in Côte d’Ivoire, would have guessed that Patricia Simon-Hart was launching herself into the heady, competitive world of oil service engineering in Nigeria.

In the course of the three day Offshore West Africa conference and exhibition in late 1998, she had beaten four other companies in the quest to represent CLAMPON, a producer of sand diagnostics equipment, in the Nigerian market. She would, in the years ahead, build a company with capacity to offer reservoir management solutions.

By December  2006, at the time of this writing  Aftrac, her Port Harcourt based firm, had done more than deploy other companies’ products on oil fields.

“Now my guys have more hands on experience in running the service in Nigeria than CLAMPON”, she said, at a breakfast meeting in Abuja’s Hilton Hotel. “We are a better CLAMPON representative than many others in the world. CLAMPON wants to use our engineers elsewhere in Africa. We pay them commission now, because my engineers will be doing the job, with their technology”.

More often than not, the agreements that technical companies sign with “local content” partners deliberately omit provisions for transition to local service and training of Nigerian engineers to do the work. So how did she do it?

“When we signed on Clampon they believed they’d send their engineers to do the job”, Simon- Hart recalls, “but I insisted; I had to fight. For the first job, they sent their engineers. On the second job, they weren’t able to come on time. They couldn’t meet the deadline. So my engineers started trying to figure out the interpretation of the chart. What do we do to get the zero step value right and get the calibration..”.

Water inactivity fall-off Test on Seplat operated Amukpe 2T

For this comely entrepreneur, a technical background has been a help. Simon-Hart graduated with Mathematics (with computer option) at the University of Port Harcourt in 1986. She attended University long after the days of punching cards were over. There were PCs run on DOS. She studied programming in the languages of the time: basic, fortran.. By the mid eighties, the Nigerian economy had started to implode. The first clear signals of large scale unemployment were emerging.

But Simon-Hart had three jobs waiting for her when she finished Youth Service at the Federal Ministry of Health in 1987. “All through my final year two years earlier, I’d been focused on getting a job. I’d worked as an intern at Elf Petroleum (now TOTAL Energies) in 1984 and decided I wasn’t going to work in a user environment. In final year (1986). I did the UAC graduate recruitment; they employed me, the only one from Uniport. Some of us in my class got interviews with NCR. They invited me to join them when I finished youth service, just like UAC too was waiting. Then again, in my final year, I presented a paper at the Computer Association of Nigeria(CAN) Annual Conference. Senior personnel from INLAKS at the meeting were impressed. They invited me”.

She chose INLAKS because she felt “they were young and growing and dynamic. I was a programmer. Every IT person wants to be a programmer. But in Nigeria at that time, we weren’t doing any programming. We weren’t doing any software development. We were only modifying other people’s software. It was very boring. You want to be sitting down developing systems. (It has changed now, twenty years after, in 2006, even though you still get a long way to go)”.

In no time, Simon- Hart was transferred from programming into projects. “We were doing data migration for banks. They thought I had a marketing flair. They made me start doing presentations on new software they wanted to bring into the market. They made me set up a PC unit and we introduced UNISYS PCs; mainframes and mini computers into the Nigerian market”.

Soon she was made the founding manager of the Port Harcourt office. But the youth and dynamism she saw in the company was withering.

“The Nigerians developed the market at the time but INLAKS would just bring in an Indian man to be marketing manager. We didn’t see career growth. A lot of us left”. Simon-Hart joined MTS-which turned out to be one of the precursor to the emergence of mobile telephony in the country. “I thought I needed telecommunications experience-because IT and Telecoms were becoming one industry at the time. I came on board as the regional manager for the east; their key products were two- way Radios. I started my own business after that”.

“I AM NOT A TRADER I didn’t want to be in an industry where I’d be in competition with traders. I wanted something more professional”.

The company she started out with was a little family business called Delpham. The original idea was to help companies out with their IT network systems, but Simon-Hart went on to specialise in companies that were petroleum related; refineries, petrochemicals. “I didn’t want to be in an industry where I’d be in competition with traders. I wanted something more professional.” She was talking to people in instrumentation departments and they asked her to move into instrumentation. Aftrac was registered in 1993 but it started operations in 1998.

Simon -Hart dismisses the misgivings that taking off as a manufacturer’s representative dilutes the Nigerian content idea. “There’s nothing wrong in starting as an appendage so long as you’re focused on growing value”.

Her model:

Start with the sense that you want products that help the customer to reduce the cost of getting the oil out of the reservoir. Market the products that you choose.

Install the product, with guarantee that you’d service them. If the product develops a problem, you have to do some level of maintenance. These are little products, but the same goes for companies that install mudlogging systems, or such large scale well and field intervention processes.

You have to know bits of it. You don’t have to be able to manufacture the parts. Even if you go abroad, you can’t get a package-all the parts- in one place. What you need is a system integrator. By the time you start to maintain the products, with your own engineers, you are beginning to develop familiarity and beginning to own the technology”.

Simon- Hart saw the product CLAMPON in Oil and Gas Journal and started sending emails. The company’s officials agreed that they should meet at the Offshore West Africa conference in Abidjan. “They were looking at some four Nigerian companies. They chose us-they didn’t want a jack of all trade kind of company; they wanted a small company. They decided to go with us; I think it was God’s favour”.

Before the meeting, Simon-Hart had started to “feel” the market. “We wanted to find out if it was a product that the companies really could use”.

Back home, after the “victory” in Abidjan, she made presentations to the major companies. Her business model, which is about running services rather than merely selling products, came out of interactions with users in the industry. “We met a PTech in Shell Port Harcourt. He told us that if we supplied the equipment as a product it would just get dumped. He said we should run it as a service. By the time we got the agency and ordered, he had left. It was Shell Warri who gave us our first contract”.

This interview was originally published in the November 2006 edition of The Africa Oil+Gas Report.