You're listening to taking stock with pin Box and Kathleen Nays on Bloomberg Radio. The latest technology in so many areas. How about technology for gas measurement and analysis that has led to a very lucrative order with Italy's largest gas transmission company for the man and the company that we're going to talk about now. See u I Global. Bill Clough is a president and CEO of this firm. They
have headquarters for electronics division in Twileton, Oregon. They have another headquarters in Stone, England in the United Kingdom, and then corporate offices in Houston. Bill, We're glad you could find a place to sort of land with us right here in our New York studio. Thank you so much. Okay, See you I Global? What are you? What do you do? We're basically a publicly traded company on the NASTAC were
to business units. One, as you mentioned basin t Wallleton, Oregon, which is an electronics company, really a commodity driven company that delivers over twenty thou different products to as many as seventy four thousand discrete customers, so very large customer base and product base. And then I think the more exciting division is our Gas and Energy division, which as you mentioned, is based out of Stone in the UK.
That division is designed to really deliver high tech metering and measurement devices to the natural gas industry, and we've been quite successful in really marketing a very differentiated manner of metering gas in the pipeline. That's the one you talked about with this Nambretta, which is the Italian gas transmission company. Tell us a little bit about how someone goes from being an air marshal and a lawyer and a police officer to running a company that is focused
on gas metering technology. Well, I don't know how someone
does that. I can tell you how I made a bad two million dollar investment in a company that I thought was something that wasn't in In In order to protect that investment and recover it, I ended up coming into the company originally as general counsel, and I ended up about eight years ago now becoming president CEO, and took the company from really the verge of bankruptcy to where it is today, which is a much more uh solvent, obviously much more a much stronger company than it was then.
So you obviously have a very background. You bring so much to the table. I wanted to know specifically what your technology is in terms that you know non UH gas transmission technologists can understand. Because one thing is pretty clear. It's cheaper to use, and that's so important, particularly a time when the energy industry is under pressure than the old, more traditional technology. What's different? What's special about your technology, Kathleen,
you've identified it exactly. The most important thing to an operator of a natural gas pipeline is the measurement of bt US of British normal units, which is how you build the gas. That British normal unity is composed with two different elements. One is volume and the other is energy content, and energy content is what we measure. Historically, energy content and gas has been measured the same way
for sixty years. It's been done by really a lab instrument called a gas fromatograph, which is very expensive, not particularly accurate, and very high maintenance installation of around two d fifty thou dollars and about twelve or thirteen thousand dollars a year in maintenance costs. What we've done is developed the technology that replaces that gas gromatograph and does it in a way that is much more efficient, much faster, much more accurate, and most important, maintenance free, and about
a fifth of the installation fee. So what we give the gas operated the ability to do is measure the gas much more accurately and therefore charge what they're actually delivering to the customer as opposed to an average, which in most cases means the operator is getting less than what they're actually delivering. If I was going to see one of these pieces of equipment, is it like a kiosk? Is it? What does it look like? It's much smaller
than that. Actually, the analyzers themselves look like two water glasses about the size of a large water glass. One measures CEO two content and the other measures UM three components that are used to make to UH infer UH the calorier value in its final phase. Though in the way it finally looks on the pipeline, it looks like a box about two ft by three ft square that sits right on top of the pipeline with a probe
that fits into the pipeline. So it's a very small footprint UH and and very amenable to UH locating it anywhere on the pipeline. Bill clef c I Global, you've got this new contract with this Italian gas company is one of their largest. Uh. How so this is an important step. How important of this step? How big is this market? How much of it do you want to overtake? What have your revenues from the United States about a third from the UK? What's next? Well, I can tell you, Kathleen,
that you hear of companies talking about inflection points a lot. Well, I can tell you that this contract for us is just that an inflection point. We've spent five years convincing the industry that this technology works number one and number two,
that wee can to liberate accurately and in numbers. We've done that in conjunction with getting certification throughout Europe and getting safety certification throughout Europe, and in improving basically to the largest pipeline company in Europe that were so good that they have decided to change the entire way they
measure gas on their pipeline. They have, in essence, put forth a hundred and seventy million euro project in three years to deploy thirty three hundred of our devices throughout their system that they believe will allow them to much more accurately build a gas that they're delivering they're so convinced of that that they've done this really in the face of a changing sixty year old technology, changing these gas fromatographs to the new gas PTR device. How do
you say that gas gas cast gas chromatograph like that word? Allrkay. Well, I'm gonna ask you about liquefied natural gas and terminals that import l G. What role do you see playing there? Well, we play a big role with them. In fact, that's how our technology was originally developed. It was originally developed to be on the wharf to measure liquefied gas as
it's re gassified. Because what happens is when a gas has been liquefied and then is regasified, it's very very hot because the inerts, the nitrogens, the C twos have burnt off, they're gone. So what happens is it comes off the ship, it's regasified, one of our devices measures it in essence sets forth the calorifer value. It's then injected generally speaking with nitrogen to cool it down, and then it goes to another one of our devices to very quickly show that it's in the right range, and
it's then injected into the network. So we were originally applied to liquid natural gas, but the applications we find now in the pipeline for example STAMRATDA are much more, much broader and much much larger. What's your next step, Well, I think our next step is really to seek out the next big customer. We're now dealing with the French company on G. We have some very good inroads into a TransCanada up in Canada UH, and we're looking at
some of the bigger pipeline companies in the US. To really make moves into those pipeline companies like we have with Snamretta, you need to it also expanded distribution agreements. You've been doing that as well. We have actually we
have about forty distribution agreements now worldwide. We just signed recently a very big one for US which is with a company called Oto Kim, which is a very respected French company that really helps us UH credibility wise and otherwise with the French pipeline company on G. What's your biggest challenge Is it that you you've got kind of a global presence as you try to get through this works. This is great buy from US. What's your biggest challenge
in Europe? In Asia, even in the US. My biggest challenge is really simple, the inertia of sixty year old technology that's not broken. It's not very accurate, it's not very fast, it's expensive, it's old, but guess what it works. And I can't tell you how many times I've had engineers, both in Europe and the U S tell me we love your technology. It really looks like something we'd be
interested in. But I gotta tell you, no one's ever been fired for buying a gas gromatograph, and that of all the things that we faced, that inertia is really the most difficult to overcome. And that's why Stambretto was such a big deal for us, because it's the first step in overcoming that inertia. I can ask you about Brexit and the vote to leave the European Union by the voters of the United Kingdom, how's that going to
affect your business? I actually live a halftime in the UK, so I was there for the Brexit vote and for the the politics leading up to that, and it was, without a doubt, a very traumatic event. Seriously, though, as it's beginning to roll out, first and foremost, we don't believe it will affect as much at all for the first two or three years, because frankly will take at
least that long to negotiate the UK out. Secondly, all of our safety and our ability and accuracy certifications are both EU and UK specific, so that's not gonna affect us at all. Really, the near term effect has been, in essence, a a lowering of the value of the pound, and we're a UK company that deals in pounds, so in that sense we have face a little bit of ahead. We're gonna leave it there, thank you very much. Bill Coffee is the president and the chief executive of c u I