Aware of the growing worldwide water demand, WEG has been increasing its revenues from solutions for major water and desalination projects, and gaining market share in the main global markets.

Counting on an exclusive structure to serve large engineering companies, especially those from Spain and France, which are also regarded as builders and operators leading this international market, WEG has been able to participate in the largest overseas projects.

The most recent project is the new seawater desalination plant called Rabigh 3, in Saudi Arabia. For this project, WEG will be supplying electric motors and variable speed drives for the main processes in the water desalination chain, ranging from intake pumping, pretreatment and reverse osmosis process until post-treatment.

Altogether, there are 69 motors and 50 medium voltage frequency drives supplied  through companies in the segment, such as the Abengoa, SIDEM and Sepco III consortium, for engineering, procurement, construction and commissioning of the plant. This supply will generate revenues of approximately R$ 50 million (US$ 8.5 million) for WEG.

As stated by Rodrigo Cetenareski, Global Manager for Water Segment, this type of supply requires not only on high technology and performance equipment, but mainly on long-lasting and highly efficient products and on services support that are required by end-users during the entire cycle of life of the plant operation.

“Desalination plants consume large amount of energy and require high performance equipment. At WEG, through relationships built up with the main global engineering companies, we have been able to optimize an efficient, reliable, flexible and long-lasting solution that makes us competitive in this type of business”, says Rodrigo.

Rabigh 3 is located on the western coast of Red Sea and when in full operation it will  supply 600,000 m3 of water per day and will provide potable water to approximately three million people.

This WEG initiative, which is based on providing exclusive service to large engineering companies, has already awarded WEG new supplies in the Middle East for 2021. It has also improved the company expertise to meet national demand, which should be more intense in the coming years due to the new regulatory framework for sanitation, recently sanctioned in Brazil.