Deleum Group Managing Director Nan Yusri Nan Rahimy can trace his passion for the oil and gas industry back to his high school days. Nevertheless, when he returned to Malaysia in late 1995 after studying mechanical engineering at Melbourne’s RMIT University, he accepted a job at a manufacturing plant. However, that wasn’t the end of his desire to work in the industry. “When I started with the manufacturing plant, I also kept looking out for opportunities to join companies that were involved in oil and gas,” he says.
Two months later, his determination bore fruit. He was offered a position with Delcom and didn’t think twice about resigning from his manufacturing job. “I truly believed the oil and gas industry was the one I wanted to be in,” he says. At that time, Delcom was still operating as a trading company with a staff of about 80 to 100 people.
“I joined Delcom on 1 April 1996 as a marketing executive, and later my job
was redesignated as a project application engineer. Within a year, I was promoted to assistant manager, then to senior manager and then to assistant vice-president,” he says. Finally, on 1 March 2011, just 1 month shy of his 15-year anniversary of joining the company, he took on the role of group managing director.
The company that Nan now leads is quite different to the one he joined in 1996. In May 2007, it became a publicly listed company on the Malaysian Stock Exchange, and in the past 5 years staff numbers have grown from 350 to 900.
What’s in a name?
One of the first things Nan tackled when he took on the group managing director role was the company’s name. As he explains, Deleum was the name given to the holding company when it listed. It is a combination of the company’s name since its inception in 1982 (Delcom) and Oleum, a Latin word for hydrocarbon oil. “One of the reasons we adopted a different name then was because of the ‘com’ at the end of the name Delcom. We thought the nature of the company might be misconstrued by the public and they would think we were a telecommunications company rather than an oil and gas company.”
The industry and its employees, on the other hand, had a long association with the Delcom name, so a decision was made to continue using Delcom for the company’s subsidiaries or operating companies. But when Nan, as a newly appointed group managing director began travelling around to supply bases and facilities in Malaysia and the region in 2011, he uncovered confusion about the company’s names.
“I realised that every time we met new customers, or even the current customers, the same question would arise.” He became convinced that it was time to standardise the Deleum name across the entire group. “I thought for us to move to the next level we had to be united, and not only within the organisation but also in how we projected ourselves in the branding.”
His board, however, wasn’t so easily persuaded. “Initially, there was a lot of resistance because of the history behind the Delcom name. The major shareholders who were also board members had a lot of emotional attachment to the name and they would have liked to retain the Delcom name.”
Opportunities for growth
It took 3 presentations to the board to bring them around to his point of view. In 2012, the company undertook a small rebranding exercise to coincide with its thirtieth anniversary and standardised its name to Deleum. “I feel this is one of the major milestones that has elevated us to where we are today,” he says. Another boost was the product of 6 months of weekly meetings with senior managers.
“Within that time we rehashed our mission and vision statement and defined the shared values of the company.” Nan believes that work setting the company’s direction for the next 10 to 15 years has been pivotal to its incredible growth in the past 5 years. “I truly believe that the company’s direction has to be very clear and it has to be understood by all 900 of the Deleum family.”
As a company we believe that once we take an employee into the organisation, we have a responsibility and an obligation to grow the individual. – Nan Yusri Nan Rahimy
Its top priority was to position Deleum as an integrated service provider, an aim that led to a re-engineering of the business into 3 separate segments: power and machinery, oilfield services, and its 2012 acquisition of blasting, painting and surface decoration services, which it calls ‘integrated corrosion solution’.
“We have 3 different approaches to growth,” explains Nan. “One is our horizontal growth where we are looking at areas that provide added value to the current core business that we have. Then there is vertical growth, where we are looking at new businesses that have a certain relevance to the current product. And third, geographical growth where we would like to start expanding to other international markets.”
But in reflecting on his milestones, Nan clearly considers the increased headcount his greatest achievement. “For me, the biggest achievement does not come from profitability or how we elevated the Deleum branding; it comes from providing a livelihood to 600 more families.
“As a company, we believe that once we take an employee into the organisation, we have a responsibility and an obligation to grow the individual, to ensure that we provide a career and not just a job.” Therefore, he adds, “We have not trimmed any of our HR budget.
We still feel that training is very important and it has to keep on going even though these are testing times.” Likewise, he says, employees know that the only way they will get opportunities for growth is if the business grows too. “All of them are very clear on that:
for them to grow organically within the organisation, the organisation must grow.”
