Universal Metal Coating Company Ltd. (Unicoil) — based in Jubail Industrial City — has been accredited with both the Saudi Quality Mark (SASO) and the Emirates Quality Mark (ESMA) by the concerned authorities of standardization and metrology for Unicoil’s products of pre-painted galvanized steel coils and sheets.
Unicoil, considered the largest producer of pre-painted steel in the Middle East, says it meets Saudi market needs and also exports to regional and international markets.
In fact, this is the first time for the authorities of standardization and metrology in both Saudi Arabia and the UAE to accredit quality marks to a company operating in the pre-painted steel industry.
Unicoil is known as the largest manufacturer concerned with high value added transformational industries in Saudi Arabia.
It owns five integrative lines of production distributed over Unicoil’s plants in Jubail Industrial City and Jeddah Industrial City.
Such lines produce 250,000 MTs of galvanized steel and 210,000 MTs of pre-painted steel and 18,000,000 LMs of PPGI sheets per annum.
Furthermore, the roll-formed PPGI sheets are the most popular end use of Unicoil products of PPGI coils.
They are used in such several fields where direct human contact is endurable as meat and vegetable cooling warehouses, refrigerating trucks, white magnetic boards, school playgrounds, sport halls, swimming pools, trade-shop doors, villa automatic garages, car parking shades etc.
In spite of the big excess in the local production of PPGI sheets, the local market has recently witnessed excessive imports from East Asia.
In fact, many of such imported products are found to go against the global and local specifications as the components of a PPGI sheet cannot be seen by naked eye.
As Unicoil has realized the impact of the imported products on the consumptive behavior, it has launched— as part of its social and industrial responsibility — a social education campaign under the title of “Know Your PPGI Sheets — Shinko.” This campaign aims at conveying a set of facts that are unrealized by those who are dealing with the roll-formed PPGI sheets.
Another campaign will be launched under the title of “Know Your Galvanized Sheets.”
In its first campaign of “Know Your PPGI Sheets — Shinko,” Unicoil shed light on some violations encountered in the components of a PPGI sheet made of imported pre-painted steel sheets.
Among such violations are that the sheet thicknesses — at the time of sale — is incorrectly declared as comparing to the actual thicknesses, the imported PPGI sheets are not compliant with the “Product Card” rule as per which the PPGI sheet components shall be shown on the final sale unit (i.e. the linear meter or LM).
The imported PPGI sheet also bears no references to the country of origin or the manufacturer as these are necessary so the manufacturing liability can then be detected.
Moreover, the commercial applications in the market lack to transparent disclosure of the components of pre-painted or galvanized steel sheets in their sales invoices made by the traders to end customers.
The “Know Your PPGI Sheets — Shinko” campaign has highlighted the fact that some of the imported pre-pained steel sheets contain less masses of Zinc than the global specification requirements.
In fact, the Zinc mass in a steel sheet is definitely the most critical factor of rustproof or stainlessness.
In addition, the paint type of several imported products, contain the harmful substance of lead, which causes big health and environmental damages.
Universal Metal Coating Company Ltd. (Unicoil ) has achieved ISO 9001:2008 certification.
It is also an active member in several international organizations in regard with the world certification of industrial standards, mostly importantly the memberships in ASTM International in which Unicoil has been recently enabled to be a participating member voting on new US standards and revisions to existing standards and the National Coil Coating Association (NCCA) along with many other international memberships.
Unicoil sets standards in pre-painted steel industry
