BP on behalf of its co-venturers in the Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli (ACG), Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC), Shah Deniz (SD), and South Caucasus Pipeline (SCP) projects is holding the third “Meet the Buyer” event. The venue of this year’s event, which opened in Baku today, is Baku Expo Centre. It will be open to public during the four days of the 21st Caspian Oil and Gas Exhibition – 3-6 June.
This event is part of BP’s commitment to helping local companies increase their participation in BP-operated projects through enhancing their capabilities, developing their business and building relationship with their potential clients. As part of the annual Oil and Gas Exhibition the “Meet the Buyer” event is expected to attract a larger number of international clients to meet the local oil and gas supplier market representatives helping them reach international markets.
This year’s event is an opportunity for up to 70 local companies, which have been through BP and co-venturers’ enterprise development and training programme - EDTP, to meet face-to-face with their potential clients, to build relationships with them and to showcase what they are capable of. These are companies representing operations support, engineering, construction, logistics, waste management, business services and other categories.
In addition, more than 500 potential buyers have been invited to attend the event and meet their potential suppliers, as well as other representatives of the local oil and gas industry supply chain.
This year BP and its co-ventures are also supporting the participation in this exhibition of the leading oil and gas universities of Azerbaijan. These include the State Oil Academy, Baku Higher Oil School, Khazar University and Qafqaz University. The event presents a good opportunity for these universities to promote themselves as part of the entire chain of the oil and gas industry, enterprise and capability development.
As part of the “Meet the Buyer” event, BP and co-venturers’ special Enterprise Development Awards will also be presented to a group of selected local companies. These include enterprises that have been particularly successful in their development efforts: successfully completed EDTP, made substantial contribution to enterprise development in Azerbaijan and focused on developing their local staff.
To select the winners, BP requested nominations from the EDTP clients and evaluated them against the award criteria. The awards will be presented in four categories:
Notes to Editors
The enterprise development and training programme - EDTP was launched in 2007. It is a multi-million dollar project that has been successfully running with over 1300 local small- and medium-size enterprises already trained or benefited from it. Of these 155 local companies have fully completed the programme and many of them have been specifically successful winning to date some $276 million worth of BP contracts. This has enabled them to create over 2000 new jobs and make $16 million self-investment.
Further information about the event and BP and its co-venturers’ local enterprise development programmes can be found on www.bp.com/caspian
Tamam Bayatly at BP’s Press Office in Baku, tel.: (+994 12) 437 75 73