Page 40: of Marine Technology Magazine (March 2011)

40 MTR March 2011 ing, simple processes take longer and get more expensive, as the steps you need to take are not obvious. The

Brazilian logic is very different from the European logic!

How are your business relations with Petrobras?

Petrobras is very big and it is complicated to know who you need to work with. ECA supplies various products and Petrobras already is a client for some products, such as the seabed imaging software from Triton Imaging.

Triton Imaging was acquired by ECA one year ago and it already was a Petrobras supplier.

So for this kind of software I need to speak to someone in

Macaé and someone in Houston, and they don´t com- municate between themselves so I end up being the link between them, so it gets a bit complicated and a lot of time is wasted. However, other than communication glitches, our business with Petrobras is very good.

With which Petrobras departments do you do most of your business?

Mostly we work with the subsea department of Petrobras and Cenpes, where they test new equipment.

When you have your Rio office operational, how many expats will be working with you?

With the local content laws in Brazil, we must hire

Brazilians even for the office. It will be only me from

France and all the other employees will be Brazilian.

To start with I believe we will hire three or four locals for the office and grow from there. The demand for our prod- ucts will dictate how many more we hire.

Which AUV and ROV models are you mostly selling in

Brazil?

Now we have the Alistar 3000 AUV, which can go down to 3000 meters. This is our model for the O&G industry.

At the moment we have a model which we are testing along with Total and Cenpes. They have asked for some modifications and we are working on them.

We are also offering the Alistar 3000 to other O&G com- panies and the Alister model AUV for military use. All our equipment with a name ending in “ar” is for civilian use and all equipment with names ending in “er” are for mil- itary use. As for ROVs, ECA offers three models, the

H1000 for deepwater inspection and intervention, the

H300 for shallow water and the Roving Bat for hull

ECA K Ster subsea mine detector & destroyer. (Photo ECA Hytec)