UMG Names South Africa Managing Director

Unique Maritime Group (UMG), one of the world’s leading integrated turnkey subsea and offshore solution providers announced today the appointment of Rodney Mckechnie as the Managing Director for Unique Hydra, its office based in South Africa.  

Mckechnie is a seasoned executive with experience gained in international Fortune 100 companies across various industrial sectors including motor manufacturing, food and alcoholic beverages, electronics, white and brown goods and also the public sector. He has consistently built high performing teams utilizing effective communication, aggressive goal setting and implementation of operating mechanisms that yield significant improvement, consistency and predictability. These teams have consistently proven themselves to be world class amongst their peers, often benchmarked as best practice internationally. His winning methodology has been to have right people in the right roles so that they contribute in a positive way to the team and the customer experience while driving accountability, growth and profitability.

In addition to being a Chartered Accountant and financial specialist, Rodney’s skills and experience include a class leading track record of achievement in terms of LEAN process optimization, project management, strategic business acumen and transformational execution in business value chain areas covering production, safety, quality, purchasing, inventory control, warehousing, sales, distribution and brand building.

On this occasion, Harry Gandhi, CEO at Unique Maritime Group commented, “We are extremely delighted to welcome Rodney Mckechnie on board. He is immensely experienced in driving operational transformation in several complex and troubled organizations. We are confident that his substantial level of experience in operational planning will help boost Unique Hydra’s profitable growth and overall performance.”

Mckechnie said, “I am delighted to be offered an exciting operational role at Unique, a key player in the subsea and offshore industry sector. I hope to use my expertise to build a highly consistent, cohesive and performance-oriented team in order to yield significant improvements in growth and performance at Unique Hydra.”

Unique Hydra is a leading manufacturer and supplier of diving equipment to the oil and gas industry. Their experience has given Unique Maritime Group a leading edge in obtaining contracts involving the design, production, supply and maintenance of its specialized equipment. Unique Hydra manufactures and offers a complete range of diving systems – from air and mixed gas to complete saturation diving systems encompassing divers LARS and Wetbells. Some of its other equipment includes the daughter craft systems, breathing air compressors and decompression chambers.