1.  KAESO was named National Service Company of the Year at the Angola Oil & Gas Awards 2025, recognizing its contribution to Angola’s upstream sector. In this regard, what have been KAESO’s most important milestones, and how has the company shown that Angolan service providers can deliver highly technical oilfield solutions?

Thank you. The most important milestone came before any contract or any building, it was the vision itself.

When I arrived in Angola in 2013, I saw a gap between what local companies were doing and what the sector actually required. To me, that gap was not normal. How can a country that has produced oil for fifty, sixty years and more not hold that technical capability inside its own borders? Closing that gap became the mission.

At the time, many people thought the idea was unrealistic, because nothing like it existed in the market. That is exactly why it mattered to state the vision clearly, and then to build a plan disciplined enough to execute it over the long term.

When we look back today, the milestones are vivid: our first major contract with an international operator, our first technology partnership, and our first expansion beyond a single service line. We even remember our first employee, hired in a garage. So it is not only Google and Apple that started in a garage; KAESO did too. If that is a signal of the future ahead of us, it is a good one.

From there we went from seven employees to fifty, to one hundred, to one hundred and fifty, and beyond. Then came our first move across borders. Each of those moments tells us the same thing: the vision of 2013 is becoming real.

And it forces an honest question, what does “local content” truly mean? Does it mean the company is registered in Angola, that ownership is fully Angolan, and that the team, including the managers, is Angolan as well? For us, the answer to all of it is yes. Many companies carry the local,content label while their leadership sits elsewhere. We can say with pride that ours is Angolan, and that we are delivering. That is what we are proud of.

 

2. Since launching in 2013, KAESO has grown into a specialized energy services provider, working with major operators and service companies. With this growth in mind, which figures best show KAESO’s strength today in asset management, downhole tools, maintenance services and client demand?

The figures speak plainly. In 2013 we had seven employees, one client, one service, and one country.

In 2026 we operate in two countries, with a third arriving this year. We have 155 employees, 140 in Angola and 15 in Namibia, more than 13 active service lines, and more than 30 regular clients.

But growth on its own is the easy part of the story. Big numbers are simple to announce; the real question is whether they last. That is where it becomes interesting.

We still hold contracts that began in 2013 and 2014. That longevity means we deliver at a level of quality our clients choose to renew, year after year. And when we compete in open tenders, we have consistently won.

Operators rank us among their best,performing service providers, measured not against a softer local standard, but against international players. That is the point we insist on: local content can no longer be a synonym for lesser value. We must compete on equal terms with international companies, or better. That is the position we claim.

 

3. This year, you described KAESO’s move toward more integrated energy and industrial solutions, with a focus on asset optimization, modular equipment and specialized procurement. How is KAESO using innovation and better processes to improve efficiency and create more value from existing assets?

For us, the engine of innovation is the market, and our market is Angola, Namibia, and Mozambique. Angola today is a mature basin, defined increasingly by brownfields.

We are watching the majors step back while mid,cap operators step in, with far more appetite for shallow water and onshore work. Historically, our strength was in ultra,deepwater and deepwater. When the market shifts like that, you cannot copy what you built for deep offshore and paste it onshore. The innovation is the adaptation itself.

So we asked the hard question: are our existing product lines fit for this new environment? Honestly, no. Which means the real work is deciding what to develop to serve it.

Consider the economics. An offshore well can cost between 100 and 150 million dollars; an onshore well, between 10 and 15 million. The investment gap is tenfold, and the volumes are different too. You simply cannot price or package the service the same way. Reengineering our offering around that reality, that is innovation.

And it does not require us to invent technology from scratch. It requires the imagination to integrate solutions that already exist and assemble them into something that answers the market as it is today.

Namibia is a different story entirely, an exploration market, effectively a blank page. It resembles Angola fifty or sixty years ago, so it demands a completely different mindset. There, innovation means one question: how do we make ourselves relevant from day one? Our answer was simple, move fast.

That is why, back in 2021, before any discovery had been announced, when we first heard of drilling activity in the south, in the Orange Basin, we went to Lüderitz and bought land ahead of the news. That is not how the industry usually behaves. The largest service companies will not commit capital to something so uncertain. But our logic was different: if we want to be relevant, we have to move first, because if we wait, the space will already be taken.

So we built. Today, in Lüderitz, we operate the only integrated oil and gas base closest to the Orange Basin. And because we built it, international service companies now come to us to deploy their own operations from our facility. Those are the kinds of positioning moves we make. We see it simply: we belong to this country and to this region, and we are willing to invest in our own land without fear. That is how we make the difference.

 

4. You have worked with major clients and partners, including SLB, TotalEnergies and Azule Energy. While building KAESO’s role as a national technical partner, how do these relationships help KAESO raise standards, transfer knowledge and strengthen Angola’s local content ecosystem?

This question goes to the heart of how we grow, through continuous improvement and relentless learning.

One truth is inescapable in this industry: it is driven by technology. We can reach pockets of oil today that were simply unreachable years ago, because the technology now exists. And alongside technology come the disciplines of standards, policy, HSE, and quality. You cannot play at this level without mastering all of them.

None of us is born knowing this. I spent a decade with a leading oilfield services company before founding KAESO, and even that was not enough to run a company at the level the work demands.

When you earn the chance to work with world,class operators and service companies, you enter a relationship where you must be comfortable receiving hard, direct, unfiltered feedback. They tell you what you are doing well and exactly what must improve. If you are willing to listen, to learn, and to act, and to prove it every time, you get better. When they return for the next audit and find that every point has been closed, you know you are on the right path.

With our operators, that has been the experience: a demanding, clarifying, genuinely rewarding learning curve. They are exacting about what they want and what they do not, and the responsibility is ours to listen and deliver. They have done this with us from the very beginning. I have lost count of their visits to our base, but I can tell you the base is far stronger and operates at a higher standard because of every one of them.

That is how these relationships lift us. And we did not keep the lessons in one place: we carried everything we learned in Angola and built it into Namibia, into Lüderitz. We gain knowledge, we save time, and we keep getting better.

 

5. KAESO wants to invest in infrastructure and local talent so that Angola’s resources bring real benefits to local communities. How does this vision shape KAESO’s ESG approach and its commitment to developing Angolan technical talent?

We have a phrase at KAESO: we grow with our community.

What does that mean in practice? For some, ESG means delivering bags of food to an orphanage. We respect that work entirely, but we see our role differently. For us, social impact has to mean building capability inside the country, and doing it in a way that lasts. That begins with infrastructure. Every facility we build sits in the middle of a community, and inevitably shapes it.

Take Bengo. Around our base we contract a local restaurant, the people who launder our crews’ coveralls, and a range of other services that keep the operation running. Investing in infrastructure is the first, most concrete way we touch the community living around us. That is what “we grow with our community” means.

The second pillar is people. I say this openly to my team: we could run KAESO more cheaply and more efficiently by hiring expatriates. We choose not to. Not because it is easy, and not because it is hard, but because what we are building is capability inside the country. Is it more expensive? Yes. Is it less efficient in the short term? Yes. But if another crisis like COVID arrives and everyone leaves, the capability stays here. That is the trade we will make every time. We do and will continue to the same in all the regions where we operate.

 

6. Looking ahead, what sits at the top of your priorities in terms of opportunities, expansion, energy projects and creating more value across the region?

Speaking at a high level: our priority is to participate fully in Angola’s shifting market, and just as deliberately in the new exploration markets opening in Namibia and Mozambique.

In simple terms, we want to operate on both coasts of Southern Africa, the western shore and the eastern shore. That is the goal for this year. Once we have real depth on both coasts, we can begin to look in other directions. But depth on the coasts comes first.

There is also a ladder of maturity in local content, and it is worth being honest about where the rungs sit. At the first level, you win a contract and subcontract the service entirely. At the second, you perform part of the work and subcontract the rest. At the third, you deliver the full service yourself, importing only the equipment. Each step deepens your participation, but at every one of them, you remain dependent on imports.

What we want now is to move beyond services altogether, into a different conversation: industrialization. What can we assemble in,country? What can we manufacture here, for the country, and for the region?

And when I speak of the region, I mean it seriously. We have to align with the emerging reality of free movement of goods, people, and capital. Southern Africa cannot develop as a collection of small, closed, isolated markets. These countries must integrate. Otherwise the market is never large enough to produce genuine regional champions.

 

7. You arrived in Angola in 2008 with SLB and launched KAESO in 2013 to show that a local company could provide technical services. Looking back at this journey, which achievements are you most proud of, and what legacy would you like to leave behind in Angola’s energy services sector?

What I am proudest of is delivering this work with people from the region, and watching them rise. That is the achievement that means the most.

We have colleagues who came in with no background in oil, who started at the most junior level, and who climbed, through training, dedication, and sheer work, into positions of real responsibility today. Nothing is more rewarding than that.

The second is our first move abroad. Who would have believed that an Angolan company, a local company, operating in a tough home market, could cross into a neighboring country and become relevant there? That it is now visibly possible, and that other companies are following the same path, is extraordinary.

We may have been the first to make that journey visible as an Angolan company entering Namibia, but today we speak with many others preparing to do the same. That is the part I cherish most, we are part of a movement that is turning this region from an idea into a reality.