By TEH SHI NING

FRANKLIN Offshore Holdings broke through the ranks to emerge top in this year's E50 rankings. It is also the first company to be steered into that coveted spot by a woman CEO.

Angie Tang's achievement, as CEO of Franklin, is particularly striking as the firm's rigging and mooring businesses, and the marine and offshore industries it operates in, remain largely male-dominated.

The 51-year-old Ms Tang, who is married and has two children, will have you know that she is 'not just a CEO who sits in a room' but one just as at home in the shipyard's warehouse or on a vessel as she is behind her desk.

Fresh out of school, her first job was in a shipyard handling sales and purchasing. She soon joined a rigging firm, but when that folded, she ventured out with a few partners in 1985 to set up what was then known as Franklin Offshore Supply and Engineering, focusing solely on providing rigging equipment and services to the offshore oil and gas industry.

As it developed its capabilities, Franklin moved into the deep-water mooring business, providing equipment and services to players in that area as well. More recently, it has progressed from pre-laying mooring services to tendering for projects for permanent mooring.

'It's a natural transition because we helped the oil companies save time by pre-laying at wells before the rig comes to location to hook-up, so once they've found the oil and will need to be there in the long-term, we can look into the production side of their business and provide permanent mooring installation,' Ms Tang explains.

Over the years, Franklin has entered the Guinness Book of World Records twice - once in 1993 for the largest cable-laid sling, a wire rope measuring 22 inches in diameter, and a second time in 2000 for the longest Grommet sling, used in the offshore lifting of platforms.

With fabrication and engineering capabilities within the group's 14 subsidiaries worldwide, Franklin owns patents for the manufacturing of equipment for heavy offshore lifting, and launched its Merlion brand back in 2004 to market its proprietary products.

In tandem with its growing spheres of business, Franklin's geographical reach has expanded. At present, the company has a joint venture in Malaysia, an active presence in six other countries overseas, and a dormant legal entity in Europe.

Much of its globe-trotting came as Franklin followed its major customers in search of oil and gas resources. The key regions being looked at now include the Middle East, where Franklin has a rigging shop in Qatar and is looking to set up a base in Dubai.

With several projects in regions such as Angola and Mauritania, it has also been surveying the possibility of sinking its roots into African soil. At the moment, equipment is mobilised from Singapore, but, Franklin is on the lookout for appropriate partners there should customers require a presence in the region in future.

The company's growth has also necessitated a paradigm shift in its way of doing business. 'In the past, we ran a more traditional Chinese style of management. But as we grew, we realised we needed to recruit more professionals, put in place finance and internal controls and get our corporate governance right,' Ms Tang relates.

Change was only implemented aggressively two years back, and though it was difficult to get everyone on board right away, Ms Tang says her staff have now adapted fully.

'I have great people with me, many are long-serving and happy to be working in the Franklin family,' says Ms Tang.

'I think it's rare to find salesgirls so willing to pull on boots and helmets and go round the warehouses,' she says. A white helmet sits on each desk in their office, mandatory safety gear for all headed to the shipyard.

'There is no such thing as official retirement in this company and we don't think in terms of re-employment but continuous employment,' she says, referring to the recent schemes in Singapore to encourage employment of older workers.

It has not hesitated to recruit foreign expertise either, crucial to building up local talent for Franklin's specialised operations and strengthening its R&D arm.

Other than 'good people with a passion for the business', Ms Tang says that Franklin's positioning as a 'one-stop shop, providing the full range of services and infrastructure required by customers from the oil, gas and marine construction industries' has helped carve out its competitive edge over competitors worldwide.

In the rigging business, Franklin's smaller rivals do not own the fleet of vessels necessary to successfully enter the mooring business. Likewise, its main competitors in the deep-water mooring business do not provide rigging equipment and services.

In the context of the global economic downturn, the good news for Franklin, Ms Tang says, is that there has been 'no immediate impact' as projects in their industry are committed to in advance and its order books for the year ahead are healthily full.

Its annual turnover, which was US$160 million in 2007, is also expected to have grown this year.

However, Ms Tang does add that should shipbuilders and rig builders start feeling the impact, especially if oil prices fall, the following years will be challenging for Franklin too.

She says: 'We're cautious about extensive capital commitments because of the tight credit market, and try to grow progressively and strategically instead of making too many investments at one go.'

But this lady CEO, who despite a threateningly overcast sky was game enough to strap on a helmet to show her visitor the shipyard's massive anchors, chains and coils, is confident that Franklin can weather the storm.

This article was first published in The Business Times on 24 November, 2008.