AUPEC management buy-out signals
new drive for company growth
AUPEC, the University of Aberdeen’s petroleum economics and benchmarking consultancy, has negotiated a management buy-out to provide the company with a new springboard for success.
The board of directors, Mr Tom Cross (Chairman), Professor Alex Kemp (Director) Mr David Rose (Executive Director) now hold 80% of the company. AURIS Ltd (Aberdeen University Research Industrial Services), which was the parent company from 1986 to September 2000, has retained a 20% shareholding. Dr Alastair Alexander, the Chief Executive of AURIS is on the new Board.
Dr Alexander said: “AURIS and the University welcome the management team taking a controlling interest in the business. It fits our strategy of encouraging commercial companies based on the University’s intellectual property and expertise and of getting the private sector to drive AUPEC’s growth.”
Professor Kemp, an internationally renowned expert on oil petroleum economics, and David Rose his Research Fellow, started AUPEC in 1986 as a result of Professor Kemp’s work at the University’s Economics Department. The company has gone from strength-to-strength and now offers benchmarking services to monitor the performance of IT on upstream and downstream companies worldwide. New benchmarking studies launched in 2000 also look at the performance of enterprise resource planning systems for upstream and downstream oil companies and for chemical companies.
The company also ran a pilot study earlier this year to apply their benchmarking models to refineries in the US and Europe. The AUPEC benchmarking team finds today that they are in strong demand to run workshops for the oil sectors in places like Houston, Kuala Lumpur and Oman.
AUPEC employs a dozen full-time staff plus contractors and recently moved to state-of-the-art premises at the Aberdeen Science and Technology Park at the Bridge of Don, with support from Scottish Enterprise Grampian.
Tom Cross, Chairman of AUPEC and Managing Director of Dana Petroleum, Britain’s fastest growing independent oil company, said: “This marks the beginning of an exciting new chapter for a company with a strong reputation for excellence in economic analysis for the petroleum sector.
“We see this MBO as providing a launch pad to take the company onto a new level of activity. It also provides the opportunity to acquire the skilled resources we need to meet the challenges being offered by a strongly supportive clientele.”
Further information: Dr Alastair Alexander, AURIS Chief Executive, on (01224) 272482.