Home » Directors' Report » What We Do

What We Do

Our business

Aggreko provides power and temperature control solutions to customers who need them either very quickly, or for a short or indeterminate length of time. We have two business models; in the Local business, we hire our equipment to customers, who then operate it for themselves, although we retain responsibility for servicing and maintaining it. In the International Power Projects business, we operate as a power producer. We install and operate power plants and our customers pay us for having the generating capacity available, as well as the electricity we produce for them.

We do this on a global basis, with 148 service centres and offices in 34 countries; in 2010 we served customers in about 100 countries. The solutions we provide range from the simple to the very complex, for example:

  • generating power for entire countries in times of severe power shortfall;
  • multi-million pound projects to help increase production in petrochemical plants by providing additional power and liquid cooling;
  • the design and operation of the temporary power infrastructure for major public events such as the Olympic Games and the FIFA World Cup;
  • providing temperature control in an office after the air-conditioning has broken down;
  • installing chillers to provide the cooling for temporary ice-rinks; and
  • renting a generator for a few days to a power utility while it carries out improvements to transmission lines.

The distinguishing features of our business are:

  • The products and services we provide are mission-critical. Power and temperature control are utility services without which our customers cannot operate. Most customers use our services only occasionally – but, when they do, they rely on us to keep their business or even whole cities and countries functioning and safe. They are therefore likely to be more interested in quality of service rather than price.
  • We are not exposed to the fortunes of any single end-user market. All businesses use power, and many use temperature control. Our equipment and services are transferable between end-user segments, so the generator used today in a pharmaceutical plant may be on a film set tomorrow and a building site the day after.
  • We operate globally. This means that we can respond to events as they happen anywhere around the world and can move our equipment to wherever it can deliver the best returns.
  • We are organised to address all types of opportunity, from the rental of a single generator for a weekend, to managing huge projects worth many millions of pounds.
  • We are experts. We are focused on a very narrow range of products – power and temperature control – and that means we have technical expertise, equipment, skills and experience on a scale, and to a depth, that we believe nobody else can rival.
  • We design and manufacture our own fleet, which means that we are able to optimise it for the specific requirements of our customers and of the rental business.
  • We keep our equipment for its useful life, so the better we build and maintain the equipment, the longer its life will be and the more money we make. We therefore take enormous care to build and maintain our equipment to the highest standards and this, in turn, means that our customers see high quality and reliable equipment.

By developing these competitive advantages, Aggreko has grown over the last 50 years or so to be the world market leader with outstanding people, strong customer relationships, a powerful brand and an excellent reputation. We have also developed a business large enough to enjoy economies of scale, which has enabled us to deliver highly attractive returns to shareholders while delivering outstanding value and service to our customers.