BLV (ASX) australian article

Weld done: Neptune rises
Kevin Andrusiak
March 29, 2005
A TINY Perth company with just five employees could change the face of the worldwide shipping industry through a patented technology that allows stricken vessels to be repaired in the water.

Neptune Marine Services's founder Clive Langley claims to be the first in the world to have developed a unique underwater welding method that cuts out the need for costly dry docking and hyperbaric chambers.

So impressive is the technology that the Royal Australian Navy has called on the company to fix two cracked hulls in its fleet. Its most recent repair job was in Sydney last week. And so confident are investors of the potential applications that Neptune's stock price has increased more than five-fold since its $2.25million listing in April last year.

Before the float, critics had suggested that Neptune would go the way of similar technology floats in the 1980s - underwater.

They would have been about to chalk Neptune up as another failure when it tanked on issue and didn't even trade one day in June. But Neptune now has a market worth of about $41 million.

Neptune managing director Andrew Harrison said the appeal of the new technology was that a ship could be repaired while in the water even during unloading or loading.

"Dry docking can be a horrendous waste of time and money," Mr Harrison said. "The technology is relatively simple to understand. The shareholders can get their heads around it."

The technique involves attaching a box no bigger than a briefcase to the area surrounding the crack and filling it with an inert gas, usually argon, heated to 350 degrees.

A diver then manoeuvres welding rods inside the box looking through a glass window to make the weld.

The technology is on the verge of being licensed to a number of northern hemisphere shipping companies, which would be Neptune's first reliable source of revenue.

Mr Harrison declined to make a prediction about this year's profit, instead forecasting a pick-up in cash flow when licensing systems were in place.

"We are about to sign licensing agreements in Denmark and are similarly close to one in Asia," he said. "We have even had a lot of interest from the US Navy."

But the big tickets could come from ageing oil and gas infrastructure off India. Underwater repairs to pipelines can cost upwards of $1 million a weld.

Perth broker James Martin, who raised $1.2 million to get Neptune to market, said it was well known that no brokers wanted to touch the stock.

"This technology could influence the way shipping companies repair their fleet and there is the potential to do deep-sea repairs which is very lucrative."