IPCO is now an independent company within the Swedish Wallenberg group and has 600 employees, more than 35 sales and service offices and annual sales in excess of €200 million ($226.33 million)

IPCO, one of the world’s leading suppliers of sulphur solidification and handling plants, has announced a programme of investment at its Bahrain regional centre that will enable it to deliver an enhanced level of service to its Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) customers.

The company’s Bahrain office is located in BIW, Hidd Industrial Area and provides sales support as well as equipment service and maintenance support to customers throughout the GCC.

Newly announced plans will see the facility developed later this year to enable the expansion of the warehousing and spare parts operation, says Varun Mathur, IPCO market manager Middle East.

The ability to offer quick access to critical spare parts means IPCO will be able to deliver significantly reduced lead times, cutting potentially costly downtime in the event of emergencies,
 he says.

The warehouse will also carry extensive stocks of consumables and other spare parts essential to the efficient operation of the company’s solidification and material handling
equipment.

IPCO’s service operation in the GCC region is manned by trained technicians and experienced engineers who are able to travel to any customer site at short notice. Engineers also have access to a comprehensive range of specialised service tools, purpose designed to enable rapid and high quality repairs to the steel belts that are at the heart of many of its solidification systems.

A NEW NAME
IPCO may be a new name to some but the company is actually a business partner with whom many in the sulphur industry will already be familiar, observes Mathur.

Rotoform ... widely used

Previously operating as Sandvik Process Systems, best known for its Rotoform pastillation process, IPCO is now an independent company within the Swedish Wallenberg group and has 600 employees, more than 35 sales and service offices and annual sales in excess of €200 million ($226.33 million).

In joining the Wallenberg group, the company has gained the stability of being part of a business with approximately 600,000 employees and more than €140 billion in total annual sales of holdings, he notes.

Since completing its first sulphur installation in 1951, the company has supplied more than 700 sulphur forming units around the world. Today IPCO is capable of supplying complete end-to-end systems, encompassing everything from receipt of molten sulphur to transport loading of solid material.

SINGLE SOURCE SUPPLY OF SULPHUR PROCESSING
IPCO’s teams can design, integrate and commission equipment for every stage of the process, from upstream preparation, degassing and filtering of molten sulphur through a range of different solidification options, to downstream conveying, storage, reclamation and bagging or bulk loading.

In-house engineering, consulting and project management teams have the expertise to undertake end-to-end project management from feasibility studies and front end engineering design (FEED) through to complete engineering procurement construction (EPC) packages. And by assuming total responsibility for a project, they can not only ensure full system optimisation but also deliver cost savings through significant project efficiencies, says Mathur.

In terms of solidification, IPCO provides systems to meet all throughput requirements.

The well-known Rotoform, designed for small to mid-size capacity requirements, offers unrivalled product uniformity and environment-friendly operation. This system remains the world’s most widely used process for the production of premium quality pastilles.

Where higher capacity is required, IPCO’s drum granulation systems are fully automated, single pass granulation process based on rotating drum technology. The revolutionary method of forming the seeds externally from the drum allows higher operational availability and tighter control of the particle size distribution. With variable throughput rates, up to 90 mtph (metric tonnes per hour), this is the highest capacity granulation unit available in the market, he adds. More information is available at www.ipco.com.