Alistair Houghton meets PETER ROONEY, managing director of ANH Refractories Europe

HE DESCRIBES his work, jokingly, as “digging dirt out of the ground”, but Peter Rooney knows his company makes the modern world go round.

Bromborough-based ANH Refractories Europe makes materials used to line furnaces, kilns and incinerators.

It saw strong growth in 2011, with sales rising from £4m to £7m, after a number of contract wins in the Middle East oil industry.

Now its managing director, Mr Rooney, wants to see it grow still further both abroad – some 75% of its products are exported – and at home.

As more incinerators are built to turn waste into energy, and as demand for petrochemicals continues to increase, ANH’s refractories will be ever more in demand.

Refractories is a generic term for materials used at high temperatures. Those specialised heat-resistant bricks and concrete, as made by ANH, are at the heart of the industrial processes needed to produce many things we take for granted, from steel and aluminium to petrol and plastics.

“You cannot use a normal building brick or concrete in the processes we do,” said Mr Rooney. “They’d just expand and explode.

“Our materials look like bricks or concrete, but they’re made from particular minerals.

“Refractories as products have been around for hundreds of years. If you want to make almost anything, you can’t do it without refractories.

“It’s fine if you want to make anything from wood – you just cut it and fit it together. But if you want to make something from steel, or concrete, or petroleum, all those processes require high heat. You can’t do anything in those processes without refractories.

“If you don’t have refractories, you wouldn’t have steel or concrete. It sounds like an exaggeration, but it’s true.”

He added, with a smile: “A lot of people describe it as ‘digging dirt out of the ground and putting it in a bag’. But it’s a bit more than that.”

Parent group ANH Refractories, which is headquartered in Pittsburgh, turns over $550m annually and is the biggest supplier of refractories in the US.

It was formed from three US firms – AP Green, the North American Refractories Company, and Harbison-Walker.

In the US, ANH still trades under those three brands as they are so well-known in the sector. But in Europe, all ANH operations trade under the parent’s brand.

The Bromborough plant, which has been a refractories producer for decades, traded as AP Green and Harbison-Walker before it was renamed ANH a decade ago.

The Bromborough site looks after ANH’s interests in Europe and the Middle East. ANH, says Rooney, is a “hands-off parent” – though its European arm is able to benefit from technical and marketing support from Pittsburgh.

Globally, the steel industry is the biggest user of refractories, using some 60% of output. The cement industry is second, followed by the petrochemicals sector.

With the global downturn hitting the construction sector hard, demand for steel and concrete has fallen – and many refractories firms have suffered as a result.

But ANH is focused on the international petrochemicals sector – a focus which has insulated it from the worst of the downturn. Contract wins in Saudi Arabia helped drive its record growth last year.

Mr Rooney said: “Demand for petroleum products, mainly from Saudi Aramco, is very high. They’re expanding their refining capacity.

“They want to increase the amount they sell not just to Western Europe but also to other parts of Asia.

“They’re getting more involved in the manufacture and supply of downstream products. They’re expanding the capacity they have.

“Regardless of what’s happened to demand for concrete and steel in construction, the demand for energy products is high, not only from the West but also from the East.”

ANH, which sells through an international network of distributors, is now looking for business in other Middle Eastern states, including Kuwait and Iraq.

“There’s a lot still to come in the Middle East,” said Mr Rooney.

The Bromborough operation will be leading ANH’s growth into the potentially massive Indian market.

Mr Rooney said: “We’ve now taken a decision to focus on India, and that growth will come through here. With the historical connections between the countries, we thought it was best done from this base.”

In the steel industry, ANH is focusing on new territories.

Mr Rooney said: “We’ve tried to focus on the Eastern European steel market, to try to get a foothold in an area where new technology products such as ours are perhaps not so widely distributed. We’re advancing there rather than trying to take on our competitors on their home turf.”

ANH also sells to producers of higher-value metals, such as aluminium and copper.

AND Mr Rooney also hopes more growth will come from the incineration market – particularly, he said, “conversion from waste materials to power generation”.

He added: “There are more and more projects in that area, not just from the UK but from Europe as well. That plays well towards our range of products.

“We’ve picked up work from that and will continue to do that.”

Mr Rooney, from East Kilbride, near Glasgow, studied marketing and languages at Strathclyde University.

He started his career at Courtalds’ international paint division.

“I sold paints for pleasure boats and tugs,” he said. “I used to travel to various marinas in the UK.”

Next he joined metal foundry business Fibre Technology, based near Sheffield.

“He started in sales, using his French and German language skills as a salesman overseas, and rose to become managing director and a shareholder.

As a foundry business, Fibre regularly shopped for refractories – so Mr Rooney knew the technology before he moved to ANH a year ago.

“We used to supply to the same customer base, so I understand the market for refractories pretty well,” he said.

Father-of-four Mr Rooney spends his weekend with his family in Nottinghamshire, but spends the working week in Wirral with his growth plans for ANH.

ANH’s success, he says, lies with the way it analyses the raw materials it uses to create refractories.

Mr Rooney said: “The finished product is very dependent on what dirt you’re digging out of the ground.

“In different parts of the world you might get the same minerals, but more or less pure.

“It’s not just about sourcing raw materials, but quantifying them and knowing exactly what we’ve got, or how we treat it to get to the consistency we want.

“We’re dragging minerals out of the ground to create products for customers who want to keep their processes running for as long as possible. If you’re making steel or processing petroleum, you want those processes to be reliable.

“For example, there are figures that say if you shut a refinery down it costs £1m a day. It’s probably more like £2m. One significant reason a plant might come down is if a refractor fails, so this type of material has to be reliable.”

If the refractories are doing their job inside furnaces, then they also ensure less heat is wasted.

Mr Rooney said: “The more efficient our products are, the less energy the user has to use to make the product.”

He is optimistic for the future of the business, which he says will be “driven by the energy market and power generation in all its forms”.

ANH currently employs 35 people, but is now looking to grow that.

MR ROONEY wants to set up a distribution network to promote its products further, and plans to seek partners who can aid ANH’s growth.

“In the US, we supply from 20 distribution centres,” he said. “We are a large industrial retailer of this kind of product.

“That’s a very successful marketing operation. We want to employ that tactic here in Europe. We want additional distribution centres. I’d like to see us set up a network of centres that gives us reach.

“When it comes to markets further afield, we will focus on finding joint venture partners who can supply our products not just by export but by local manufacture or some blend of the two.”

Mr Rooney wants to strengthen links between the US and European operations, bringing more technology developed in American to the UK. He is also in talks with ANH’s parent group on his plans to expand the Bromborough site.

“This site has been here for a long time and there are aspects we want to develop,” he said.

“We probably use half to two-thirds of the land we have. Our building doesn’t met our current requirements – we’re pretty full.

“We’ve put a proposal to the group, and we hope that investment will start this year.”