TRANSAS 10th birthday
http://www.transas.com

photo: image files / digital ship may / Transas images / apr 03_03
Caption: at the helm of Transas: John Hardcastle and Nick Lebedev


Maritime electronics company Transas has celebrated its tenth birthday. After having four employees working for no pay in 1991, it earned its first $1m revenue within 2 years and annual revenues are now $50m. 

With nearly all of its development still in St Petersburg, Russia, it is in the very unusual position of selling Russian developed software, including navigation charts and oil spill simulators, to the US military. 

The company was founded after John Hardcastle (now managing director of Transas Telematics) attended a maritime trade show in Leningrad (now St Petersburg) as an employee of a different electronics company. 

He met Nick Lebedev, an ex-master mariner, and Alex Koukarenko, a mathematician, in St Petersburg, who had established a maritime electronics company and distribution business in Russia, with a vision to develop it into an international business. 

The three men, together with Mike Robbins, a lecturer in Warsash College, decided to move the headquarters of the company to the UK, and began building the company from a base in Southampton.

Right from the beginning, the company's objective was to build the business relying on the quality of its software and intellectual expertise, not following conventional technology business model of trying to tie customers into using proprietary standards. 

Maritime training simulators were an early feature of the product range, first installed in Pusan, South Korea and the Philippines in 1994-96. The first orders for its NaviSailor line of electronic chart display systems came from Holland America Line in 2000, which was followed by the largest ever order for electronic chart display and information systems coming last year from shipping line Maersk.

Simulators is a major growth area for the business; when it began making training simulators, selling them mainly involved persuading people that simulators were effective training tools. Now the issue is more persuading people that Transas simulators are better than others. 

Transas now plans to achieve the same level of market penetration in the aviation industry as it has in the maritime, for charts and training simulators; it is keen to try to build up a similar level electronic chart portfolio for land as it does on sea, where it has 1.2m man hours invested into a worldwide chart portfolio. 

The Telematics (ship-shore communications) division, headed by John Hardcastle, also anticipates healthy growth. Providing packages of ship-shore communication airtime, software and software support, the ambition, as Mr Hardcastle puts it, is to "solve the mess of marine communications," creating effective tools that reduce the currently often enormous workload of ships officers to handle communications. 

A new development building is being planned in St Petersburg, to open in 2003, housing the company's 600 employees. 

It is possible that the company will win new business from the increased international emphasis on maritime security, building vessel traffic surveillance systems which help ports monitor traffic coming in and out of the port. It has already developed systems for monitoring fishing vessels, which are used in Russia to collect information from over 300 ships at once.