Sealing the Source

Ahmed Tariq, Founder & CEO, Mohammed Shoeb Khan, Managing Director, Promax Contracting

How Promax Contracting turned a 15-year warranty into an industrial standard

Founded in Dubai in 2016, Promax Contracting rejected the Gulf’s habit of re-coating leaking roofs every season and staked the business on a guarantee most contractors would not sign. A decade on, its EPDM systems sit above warehouses operated by Amazon, DHL, Noon, Lulu and Dubai Police — and the model has crossed into Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and India.

In the middle of a Gulf summer, an industrial rooftop is less a structure than a battleground. Surface temperatures climb well past 50°C, and the metal responds the only way it can: expanding through the day, contracting through the night, over and over. Washers harden and crack. Screws work themselves loose. Laps that were tight in January begin to separate. In the silica-laden air of an industrial estate, galvanised gutters quietly rust from the inside out.

For years, the region’s logistics and retail operators lived with the consequences as a fixed cost of doing business. A roof would leak during the winter rains. A contractor would arrive, flood-coat the affected area in bitumen, GRP, Liquid Coatings with Mesh, PU Coatings etc, and then invoice. By the following August, the heat would have turned that repair brittle, and the cycle would begin again — a maintenance line item that never went away and never solved anything.

“The industry had normalised a temporary fix,” says and realized by Ahmed Tariq, Founder and CEO & Mohammed Shoeb Khan, Managing Director of Promax Contracting. “Everybody accepted that roofs leak and roofs get patched. We wanted to understand why it kept happening — and then fix the actual cause.”

The Surgical Method

Tariq and Shoeb launched Promax in Dubai in 2016 on a disruptive premise: the market did not need more coating. It needed a diagnosis.

Their engineers had identified that the vulnerability was rarely the roof sheet itself. A typical warehouse roof is held together by several thousand discrete connections — screws, end laps, side laps, skylight surrounds, smoke vents, fan units, pipe and column penetrations, gutter runs. Each one is an engineered joint, and each one degrades under thermal cycling. Blanketing the whole surface in bitumen, coatings, GRP, PU Foam Coatings hides those points rather than treating them, which is why it typically survives two or three Gulf summers.

Promax works the other way round. Every project opens with a free site inspection and a written diagnostic survey that identifies precisely where a structure is failing and why. Each failure point is then treated individually with UV-stable EPDM — ethylene propylene diene monomer, a synthetic rubber membrane with a service life beyond twenty five years that stays flexible in heat rather than becoming brittle, and is robust enough to walk on during routine maintenance.

Durability is engineered into details most clients never see. The team bonds with its own Promax Bonding Adhesive. Rusted fixings are replaced with stainless-steel screws one size up, so the new thread bites into fresh metal rather than a worn hole. Gutters are lined in a single continuous length with no middle joint — the point at which an overflowing gutter would otherwise push water back into the building.

“A warranty of that length is not a marketing exercise. It is a commitment. If we are liable for fifteen years, we have to be certain the work will hold.”

AHMED TARIQ, FOUNDER & CEO, PROMAX CONTRACTING

That certainty is the product. To separate itself from the maintenance firms it was competing against, Promax attached a genuine 15-year warranty to its installed systems — a level of exposure that was close to unheard of in regional contracting in 2016, and one that quietly disciplines everything upstream of it. A company that has to return for free cannot afford a shortcut on site.

A Portfolio of Proof

Moving a market away from cheap, short-term fixes required evidence rather than argument. Promax answered with education: written diagnostic reports that set the lifetime cost of a permanent seal against the recurring, compounding cost of annual patching — including the stock damage, downtime and insurance friction that rarely appear on the repair invoice.

The client roster now reads as a map of the regional economy: Amazon, DHL, Noon, Lulu, NAFFCO, Bridgestone, Nakheel, Gorica, Juma Al Majid and Dubai Police, whose General Headquarters AI Building, Al Barsha and Al Awir stations and Barsha Smart Police Station have all been treated. The scale is industrial. Promax waterproofed 66 ADNOC fuel stations across the UAE, covering close to 59,000 square metres of roof area; treated 94 warehouses for the Al Mulla Group in Al Qusais and Jebel Ali; and sealed an 18-warehouse Lulu compound in Musaffah, Abu Dhabi. More than 900 projects have been completed, with around 45 running at any given time.

What began as a Dubai specialist is now a Gulf operation. Under the name Eastern Technical Contracting & Establishment (ETCE), the group serves Saudi Arabia’s industrial centres in Dammam, Jubail, Riyadh and the wider Eastern Province, with completed work in Bahrain for Kanoo and Lulu, and a footprint extending into India.

The Human Core and Operational Discipline

The company’s structure rests on a deliberate division of labour between its two founders. Tariq owns the technical methodology and engineering execution; Shoeb owns commercial strategy and long-term client relationships. “Together, that combination allows us to be both rigorous in our engineering and responsive as a business partner,” Tariq says.

The discipline is most visible on site, where the operating constraint is absolute: an industrial client cannot stop. Promax crews therefore work entirely from above, zone by zone, so that a warehouse keeps receiving, storing and shipping underneath them without a single hour of shutdown. Reliability continues after the crew leaves, through four dedicated after-sales teams committed to responding within 24 to 48 hours.

Behind that sits a 55-strong multilingual workforce running daily safety workshops, working at height with full PPE, lifelines and access equipment. The internal standard, repeated often enough that it has become shorthand, is to treat every warehouse as if it were the team’s own property.

Sustainability and the Integrated Future

As Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 accelerates demand for industrial capacity across the Kingdom, Promax is positioning itself less as a contractor than as a technology-led industrial partner. Drones now carry out high-precision roof surveys, mapping failure points across large sites faster and more safely than a walking inspection allows, while AI-assisted tools support inspection reporting and forecasting. The longer-term ambition is a fully integrated offering that spans diagnosis, sealing, insulation and complete roof replacement under one accountable contract.

Sustainability follows from the method rather than being bolted onto it. Extending a roof’s service life by two decades avoids the embodied carbon, landfill volume and capital expenditure of repeated re-roofing — and every year of leak-free operation is a year of undamaged stock that never has to be replaced.

Ultimately, the Promax story is an argument about staying power in an industry where it is scarce. “Our objective is to be a name that clients trust without hesitation,” Tariq concludes. “Not because we are the largest, but because when we commit to fifteen years, that commitment holds.”

At a Glance