Middle East deal is sweet deal for firm

Materials handling specialist Geo Robson is supplying equipment worth more than £1.48 million for a new sugar refinery in one of the Middle East's development hotspots.

The Sheffield company has won four separate orders for handling systems which will move imported raw sugar from the dockside into storage, take it for processing, transfer it during drying and then deliver the finished product to storage.

The refinery is being built at the Sokhna Port and Logistics Centre on the Red Sea, part of a programme to raise Egypt’s economic profile in the Middle East that has already attracted $2.3bn of foreign investment. It will be run by Tate & Lyle and the United Sugar Company of Egypt, part of Saudi Arabia’s Savola Group.

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Robson is designing and partially building the conveyors, which can move 1,000 tonnes of sugar an hout, and other critical components at its Coleford Road works, while structural steelwork and ancillary items are being manufactured and installed by Egyptian companies under Robson’s supervision.

The Sokhna project is the fourth that Darnall-based Robson has worked on for Savola.

Others include the group’s refinery in Jeddah, one of the world’s biggest refineries and the first home-based sugar processing plant constructed by Savola in Saudi Arabia.

Robson is currently working on three other sugar handling projects overseas - in Poland, Turkey and Singapore.