Sandvik is the Swedish company behind one of the most astounding innovations in the urea industry – the duplex steel Safurex®, which has enabled all the critical areas of the urea plant to be built smaller, lighter, more safely and ultimately, more profitably.

The two companies have worked together since the 1960s but it was during the 1990s that extremely close co-operation gave birth to Safurex®. “Business is all about people and without the right contacts and partnerships, nothing really happens,” says Ad Raatgeep, General Manager of TUBE Sandviken. “The days of developing a new material internally, and then trying to launch it, are gone. These are processes you must undertake together with your customer, in order to develop the right material with the right properties, from the very beginning.”