Firm gets concrete results overseas

A Dade City concrete company is touted as an example of a small business with international reach.

By JODIE TILLMAN, Times Staff Writer
Published October 5, 2007

ADVERTISEMENT [Handout] SureCreteSureCrete sells much of its decorative concrete, such as this, to overseas clients.

Last spring, a Dade City concrete company sent one of its executives on the unlikely mission of drumming up business in Saudi Arabia.

The mission worked: SureCrete Design Products landed a $50,000 deal to supply chemicals and expertise needed to make decorative concrete for Atallah Happyland, an amusement park in the city of Jeddah.

Interesting break but not an entirely surprising one for SureCrete, a company with about $2-million a year in international sales and a project list that includes amusement parks in Dubai and South Korea, and an upscale residential development in Qatar dubbed "the Middle East's most glamorous address."

"That's where the money is," Zeca Gama, SureCrete's international sales manager, said of the Asian and Middle Eastern markets.

SureCrete was spotlighted by federal officials Thursday as an example of a local company embracing the global market. Officials with the U.S. Commercial Service, a division of the Department of Commerce, had gathered at the Seven Springs Golf and Country Club as evangelists of free trade agreements.

"The best way to fight competition is to export," George Martinez, a regional director based in Clearwater, told the 30 or so small-business leaders attending.

Martinez and Israel Hernandez, the Washington-based assistant secretary for trade promotion and director general for the U.S. Commercial Service, are tying their visits to a number of Tampa Bay cities to upcoming votes on the four free trade agreements - with Peru, Colombia, Panama and South Korea - pending in Congress.

Hernandez stopped short of asking attendees to call their legislators. "I can't ask you to lobby," he said. "I'm here to inform you." But his overriding message was that free trade is a no-brainer.

"I wish we could put in every store a sign that says, 'You're shopping as a free trader,'" he said.

And though he fielded some tough questions about globalization's downsides - including ones about the loss of American jobs and the safety of Chinese products - he stayed on message. He said the loss of jobs is also from domestic competition, not just international, and that productivity in the United States is higher now because of technological innovations. "We may have less manufacturers in the United States but we have more manufacturing," he said.

He told attendees to consider international markets for their companies, particularly the Middle East.

"I really encourage you to look at this region," he said, noting that Saudi Arabia is planning to build six new cities in the next five years. "They've got a lot of money, and they need everything we make." (The war in Iraq didn't come up.)

Hernandez led the trade mission to Saudi Arabia that SureCrete's Gama attended.

Gama said in a telephone interview Thursday that Martinez, who he had known for many years, had told him about the trip.

SureCrete, started in the late 1990s by Steve Thomas, will ship by boat the chemicals and powders needed to mix with the concrete. The company will also send over its own technical experts to show workers in Saudi Arabia how to use the materials to manufacture the decorative concrete to be used in parts of the amusement park. "Everything's done at the site," he said.

Gama, a native of Portugal, said Saudi Arabia has been trying to entice U.S. companies to return to the country after so many left after the Sept. 11 attacks. Throughout the Middle East, he said, he's noticed a preference for products made in the United States, Japan and Germany.

"In some of these countries," he said, "they don't seem to trust their own companies."

With the construction of new cities in the Middle East, he said, he sees even more opportunities. One of them? Oman's the Blue City, a $20-billion development envisioned to have 250,000 residents. Gama said he's working on a deal for SureCrete to sell decorative concrete products for roads and esplanades. From Dade City to the Blue City.

Jodie Tillman can be reached at jtillman@sptimes.com or (727) 869-6247.

[Last modified October 4, 2007, 21:53:24]