First Minister Alex Salmond MSP has carried out the official opening of Aberdeen oil and gas manufacturing company Omega Completion Technology’s £2 million purpose-built headquarters in Dyce.

Omega has recently made an additional investment of £250,000 in new machinery in an effort to keep up with its rapidly growing order book. The First Minister heard about the company’s ambitious plans for the future.

Just months after making the move to Omega House and announcing plans to grow it’s workforce by 20%, the firm is already looking at acquiring a second building to allow for further expansion.

Omega is breaking into a number of new international markets, and the additional machinery and potential second facility will enable staff to keep on top of the growing workload generated through new orders.

First Minister Alex Salmond said: "Omega Completion Technology is an excellent example of Scottish ingenuity and innovation leading to great commercial success.

"Scotland's energy sector is an important source of jobs and economic growth, the type of which the Scottish Government is determined to support.

"This new purpose-built facility will help keep them at its cutting-edge. Despite the tough economic climate, innovation in their well engineering technology has seen Omega thrive in a competitive North Sea market.

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"Investment in this new headquarters will allow them to expand even further. The company have existing plans to grow the current workforce of 50 by around a fifth in 2012 and, in particular, to expand their business overseas."

Mark Buyers, managing director of Omega Completion Technology, said he was delighted that Mr Salmond helped the firm to mark the milestone of moving all its operations into Omega House.

He said: "It was a great honour to welcome the First Minister to Omega House and we are delighted to have the opportunity to share our success story with him. Omega is an independently-owned Scottish company, but it has always held big ambitions to develop and manufacture cutting-edge technology for the global oil and gas industry. Innovation is at the forefront of everything we do: we currently have 23 patents for our technology and further patents are currently pending.

"We realised some time ago that our operations were constrained because of the limitations of our previous facilities, so that is why we took a bold step in investing heavily in Omega House in terms of both the building and machinery. However, never did we imagine that so soon after making that move would we find ourselves purchasing additional plant to keep up with demand. "We have greatly increased our capacity, but we feel we could benefit further from additional facilities and are actively pursuing a number of options to acquire an additional property. In tandem with the move to Omega House we recognised that we would need to increase our workforce. We have made a number of additions to the team and now have 48 employees but continue to look to grow our staff base.

"We have a multi-discipline team and do absolutely everything in-house. We believe that we are the only independent company in the well engineering sector in the UK to have every aspect of the business from mechanical and electronic development and design to manufacture and service within one facility and that is an achievement that we are incredibly proud of."

Omega Completion Technology has over 20 years of history in developing innovative tools for well intervention and completion.

(GK)