Five Golden Years — TSME’s Journey in Building EPC Capability for Saudi Arabia’s Oil & Gas Industry

This year marks a defining milestone for TSME Engineering & Construction — five years since the company’s branch was established in Cochin, Kerala, on 20 July 2020. What began as one engineer’s conviction that Saudi Arabia’s oil & gas industry deserved an EPC and industrial services partner built to international standards has grown into a structured, multidisciplinary organisation, with its main operating centre now firmly based in Al Khobar, Saudi Arabia.

Founder Tony Samuel brought over two decades of hands-on EPC execution experience with international clients, including Saudi Aramco and SABIC, to build TSME directly within the market he knows best. Rather than compete on price alone, TSME set out to compete on systems — structured project controls, certified technical manpower, disciplined safety practices, and transparent client partnerships, all centred on serving the Kingdom’s oil & gas and petrochemical facilities.

Over five progressive years, that founding idea has taken shape across multiple verticals. From its Al Khobar centre, TSME today delivers civil, mechanical, and electrical & instrumentation works under its EPC contracting arm; supports plants through shutdown and turnaround campaigns; manages facilities and technical manpower for industrial clients; and drives digital transformation through TSME Digital. Behind this, the India branch and TSME Institute build a skilled-workforce pipeline in welding, rigging, instrumentation, and HSE — addressing one of the industry’s most persistent constraints: certified, job-ready technical talent, trained and ready for deployment to the Kingdom.

The company’s certifications in ISO 9001, ISO 14001, and ISO 45001 reflect a deliberate choice to formalise quality, environmental, and safety management from an early stage, rather than retrofitting them later. That same discipline underpins TSME’s next chapter: a planned group structure spanning engineering, industrial services, manufacturing, and trading, with Saudi Arabia as the operational hub and India as the standing support base for manpower and back-office functions.

Five years in, TSME’s slogan — “Building the Future with Systems and Integrity” — reads less like a tagline and more like a description of how the company actually operates. The next five years are about scaling that same discipline: more projects across the Kingdom’s oil & gas sector, more skilled technicians trained through the Institute in India, and a stronger footprint across Saudi Arabia and the wider GCC.