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New York: Praxair, the largest industrial gases supplier in the Americas, is looking to expand its integrated business model into the UAE, chief financial officer James Sawyer said.
The UAE, along with some other Gulf countries, has seen its economy grow rapidly on the back of windfall oil revenues.
In the United States and elsewhere, Praxair runs a packaged gas business selling gases in cylinders. It also has a merchant gas business that supplies it via tankers and an on-site business that usually sets up adjacent to a customer's manufacturing facility.
"When we operate an integrated business, we can get a very high return on capital. If you just go over and build a single plant for a single customer, you can't get as high a return on capital," Sawyer said.
The company supplies a range of industries from energy to health care, and the gases it produces are used in applications such as metal fabrication, beverage carbonation and petroleum refining.
Sawyer declined to say when the foray into the Middle East would occur, but said the company was more interested in supplying a range of industries, rather than setting up one plant that caters to the needs of a single refinery.
Praxair, which posted double-digit earnings and revenue growth in the first quarter, expects this trend to continue, driven by solid demand from the energy sector and booming growth in emerging economies, Sawyer said.
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