SENER Inaugurates Manchester Office

SENER has celebrated the inauguration of its facilities in Manchester, the Group’s base for its Engineering and Construction area in the United Kingdom, which have been fully operational since 2014. An event was held in the morning of 8 May and was attended by local authorities including City Mayor Ian Stewart and representatives from key clients such as BAE Systems and Babcock. The guests were received on behalf of SENER by its Marine General Manager, Rafael de Góngora, and the Manager of its Marine office in Manchester, Fernando Sánchez.

During the event, Rafael de Góngora highlighted “the importance the SENER Group gives to maintaining a permanent presence in the United Kingdom, both for the engineering and construction projects we execute in the country through our Manchester office, and for the work performed under aeronautics contracts by ITP, from its centres in Whetstone (Leicester), Lincoln, Rugby, York and West Sussex”. He added: “For SENER, the profile of the United Kingdom is one of strategic ground, because of its highly technological tradition and its specific weighting in the Group’s activity, where we have close to 200 British employees”.

SENER uses Manchester as a base for working on projects such as the ongoing construction of two Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers for the Royal Navy, using the FORAN System, SENER’s CAD/CAM/CAE software for the design and construction of ships and offshore structures. Throughout 2015, the System is celebrating 50 years of continuous reinvention. It is a technological leader in the field and one of the most widely used applications in marine construction, employed for example in the Successor series of new nuclear submarines and the Type 26 frigates, also for the Royal Navy.

Together with the aforementioned activity in the Aeronautics sector through ITP, SENER performs other projects in the field of Engineering and Construction in the Aerospace sector, in which it is a renowned international figure in Space, Defence, and Aeronautics and Vehicles, and works as a supplier for British companies. It is also investigating potential contracts in Power and Process and in Infrastructures and Transport. It is in this latter sector that SENER has built up collaborative relationships with British universities and institutes of technology such as the HR Wallingford research centre, with which it is delivering the new industrial port in Jorf Lasfar, Morocco.

The SENER Group saw out 2014 with a turnover of £1 billion and a SENER workforce of more than 5,500. Investment in R&D was £57 million, representing 6% of the Group’s turnover. These figures place SENER as one of the leading multi-disciplinary engineering groups in R&D and in the development of technologically-differentiated international projects.