Going from heavy engineering to lightweight composite materials has changed the fortunes of one Australian company, as Alan Swaby discovers.

It’s not that the world is short of oil and gas. No, there is still plenty—but none of it is in readily accessible places any more. Deep water offshore drilling continues to find new reserves—but at depths of up to 3,500 metres or more, and you can imagine what 3.5 kilometres of steel tubing weighs.    

South African businesses are surprisingly well served with their computer needs and are often in the vanguard of what is new, as Alan Swaby learns.

When Y2K was looming down on businesses at the end of the century, no one was really sure if the whole house of cards would crumble or not. JJ Milner, founder and head of South Africa’s largest Microsoft hosting provider, felt that it wouldn’t; but he understood that his many clients preferred something more concrete to go on than just his gut instinct.

Over the past 42 years Avis has established an impressive average 38 per cent share of the South African car rentals market. Maintaining that position, however, requires continuous innovation and improvement, as chief executive Wayne Duvenage explains to Gay Sutton.

Shell Exploration & Production (Shell Bidco) has made an offer of £992.4 million for East Africa-focused Cove Energy.

UK-based Cove's primary asset is its 8.5 per cent stake in the Rovuma Offshore Area 1 in Mozambique, where operator Anadarko has found over 30 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The Rovuma offshore basin is a frontier exploration area, holding large resources of natural gas reserves suitable for LNG projects.

Wood Group PSN has been awarded a contract extension from Shell in the UK to deliver midstream engineering and construction services to the St Fergus and Mossmoran gas plants.

The £75 million, two-year contract is effective from April 2012 and includes an option for a further two-year extension. The award is a continuation of the previous contract awarded to Wood Group in 2007.

US-based Select Energy Services has entered the Canadian market with the completion of its purchase of WTR Transfer Services Ltd. (WTR).

Headquartered in Houston, Texas, Select Energy Services provides engineered water solutions to the oil and gas industry, and well-site services to energy producers.

WTR performs water transfer services for the shale drilling industry in western Canada, specializing in high volume water transfer through a "no leak" water transfer system.

Dubai-based telecoms provider Du has opened a new call centre in Fujairah staffed by 100 per cent Emirati nationals.

The announcement comes as companies across the UAE and Gulf region strive to meet stringent labour laws passed in April last year requiring businesses to increase their intake of Emirati staff in skilled labour positions. Companies that fail to meet percentage quotas can be fined up to Dh20,000.

Caterpillar Inc. has selected Athens, Georgia as the location for a new facility to build small tractors and mini hydraulic excavators, bringing production back from Japan to the United States.

Best known as the home town of the rock band REM, Athens will soon be home to a state-of-the-art, one-million-square-foot facility expected to employ 1,400 people, with a potential of 2,800 extra jobs in the supply chain in the United States.

The total investment for opening the new facility is expected to be around $200 million.

National Grid and ScottishPower Transmission have awarded a contract for construction of the first ever subsea electricity link between Scotland and England & Wales.

The £1 billion contract has been awarded to Germany’s Siemens and Italian cable manufacturer Prysmian.

The major grid upgrade will increase the capacity of electricity flowing between England and Scotland by more than 2,000 megawatts, allowing new renewable energy projects to be developed in Scotland that could power three million homes.