Surveyor Indonesia ties up with Lloyd's Register

JAKARTA (JP): State-owned PT Surveyor Indonesia, after loosing its preshipment inspection contract with the government, tied up yesterday with Lloyd's Register of England to become more competitive in the inspection business.

Surveyor Indonesia director of finance, Toga M. Sitompul, said the joint operation agreement with Lloyd's would help save Surveyor Indonesia from closing down its overseas branches.

"Today should have been a cloudy day for us. But it turned out to be a sunny day, especially after the signing of the joint operation agreement with Lloyd's," Toga said.

Faried S. Barchia, president of Surveyor Indonesia, and Peter Holland of Lloyd's Register signed the agreement yesterday.

Under the agreement, all Lloyd's businesses in Indonesia would coordinate with Surveyor Indonesia, and vice versa: all Surveyor Indonesia's overseas businesses would coordinate with Lloyd's.

Holland, Lloyd's regional director, said the cooperation should rationalize Lloyd's activities in Indonesia, which were currently overseen directly from its regional office in Singapore.

Last year, Surveyor Indonesia also signed a memorandum of understanding with German surveyor firm TUV Nord to set up a joint operation in the field of ISO-9000 and ISO-14000 certification.

Faried said the joint operation with Lloyd's would help bring a new dimension to Surveyor Indonesia as it had lost its import inspection job from the government as of yesterday.

He said Surveyor Indonesia had been diversifying its business into environmental management, trade assistance, business information and quality assurance.

Toga said his company would continue to generate revenue from inspection services despite the termination of the import- inspection contract with the Indonesian government.

He predicted the company would manage to collect a total revenue of Rp 213 billion this year (US$88 million), of which Rp 158 billion would be derived from preshipment inspections in the first three months of the year.

The company's total assets stood at some Rp 200 billion as of last month.

Last year, the company recorded a total revenue of Rp 550 billion and net profit of Rp 70 billion, up from Rp 25 billion in 1995 and Rp 13 billion in 1994.

He said Lloyd's would help manage its overseas branches in 17 major cities, spreading from Durban in South Africa to Rotterdam in the Netherlands, Toronto in Canada, New York in the United States and Sydney in Australia.

"No other single Indonesian company has such extensive overseas branches as we do. So we want to maintain such valuable assets as long as we can because it is not easy to open such branches in developed countries," Toga said.

To reduce operation costs, Toga said, his company was in the process of dismissing some 500 foreign personnel at its 17 foreign branches.

The company was established in 1991 by the government, in a joint venture with Geneva-based Societe Generale de Surveillance (SGS), to take over the inspection of Indonesian imports at points of loading from SGS which had carried out the work since mid-1985.

SGS had since 1991 acted as Surveyor Indonesia's subcontractor in conducting import inspections.

The directorate general resumes its inspection authority over exports and imports starting today, when the 1995 customs law and new customs procedures come into force. (rid)