As part of the Touax group of transportation companies, Touax Modular Building Solutions develops tailor-made, innovative and rapidly manufactured buildings to meet the needs of a range of clients across the African continent. The firm is equipped to construct a range of buildings from worksite modular units to storage sheds, to advanced technological buildings to telecom shelters and mobile telecom units. Touax’s manufacturing plant has been designed to adapt to its clients’ needs by offering quickly implemented, quality solutions at a competitive price. Drawing on its long experience, Touax is now expanding in Europe.
“We are an old company that has been working in the transportation sector for 170 years. We have been listed on the stock exchange in 1906, but we are still quite a small, family-owned company,” says Thierry S. de La Brelie, Managing Director of Touax Group.
As a transportation company, Touax is long established as a global player in the leasing of sustainable transportation solutions. The Group has 1.2 billion euros of assets under its management, managed by a team of 250 permanent employees across three main markets. The first of those markets is rail freight, which is 75 billion euros and manages 700,000 wagons in Europe and 320,000 in India. The second is freight barges, which are worth 30 billion euros, handling 6,000 barges in Europe and 25,000 in the Americas. Finally, there are freight containers, worth $124 billion, handling 54 million containers worldwide and transporting 53% of freight by value.
Across all of these markets, Touax’s position is underpinned by a strengthened CSR commitment. Touax has created a dedicated CSR committee chaired by a member of the supervisory board and joined the UN Global Compact initiative to align with its ten universally accepted principles on human rights, labour, the environment, and anti-corruption. The Group has received an Ecovadis 2023 Gold Medal for its second-ever financial rating, putting it in the top 5% of companies across all business sectors, as it received 70 out of 100 as part of the EthiFinance 2023 campaign, a six-point improvement on its 2022 performance. The firm is implementing a Green Finance Framework linked to the EU taxonomy to support its green financing, so that 75% of the firm’s financing is sustainable in nature.
“We are quite green, by nature,” La Brelie tells us. “The areas we focus on, river barges, freight railcars, containers, and modular buildings, all come down to low carbon transport, intermodal and low carbon construction. We have been awarded a gold medal by Ecovadis, and our modular building factory is ISO 140001 certified. We try to work with infrastructure and low-impact clients because there is a way to go on that road. In Europe we are the second name for intermodal railway freight, and the first for river barges and containers.”
Building a Sustainable Future
Touax Modular Building Solutions creates buildings, primarily for the African market, through modular manufacturing methods. Touax-manufactured buildings have seen use in the education sector, for care centres, hospitals, housing, including student housing, and the industrial sector. It has developed innovative solutions that can provide a bespoke response to real estate infrastructure needs in Africa and Europe. From the simplest to the most complex construction challenges, Touax’s approach enables customised, aesthetically pleasing, and scalable buildings that stand up to the most demanding safety, environmental and construction standards.
With 20,000 square metres of plant area at its disposal, Touax is able to work at scale. The firm has worked with big names in the mining sector to provide infrastructure for their projects. It has built the base camp for workers on a hydropower dam construction project, including all the necessary buildings.
“People do not just want a building. They want a full solution,” La Brelie says. “That is what we provide – a full solution. That includes solar panels, water treatment, everything. A truly turnkey solution.”
Those solutions are underpinned by high standards. Whether it is working in Europe or Africa, Touax works according to European standards, alongside international groups that expect international standards.
“They ask for higher standards, and that is what we provide,” La Brelie tells us.
A Modular History
Touax’s history dates back to 1853, but the story of its modular construction business begins with its launch in 1973. In 1982, another firm, SACMI was created, which was acquired by Touax in 2012, leading to the creation of Touax Modular Building Solutions.
Both companies were founded on the principles of modular construction.
“With traditional construction, you do the construction on site, while with modular building we manufacture the building in a factory,” La Brelie explains. “It is much more efficient to do it that way because it is an industrial process.”
As well as being more efficient, modular construction is 50% faster, and 20% cheaper. It also offers energy savings of 67% and a 90% increase in recyclable and reusable materials alongside a 40% reduction in emissions during construction.
“At each and every stage there is quality control,” La Brelie shares. “We control everything so that when it is finished, it is finished, and to the level of quality our clients demand.”
“Using traditional methods you need to use water to make cement and take the time to let it dry,” La Brelie points out. “Using the modular way of building we do not use any water. We have no water consumption whatsoever.”
A World Class Operation
The differentiators of modular construction are clear, but even within the modular construction industry, Touax stands out. But that does not mean there is no competition.
“There is a lot of competition in Africa, primarily from smaller competitors who do not follow our norms or standards,” La Brelie says. “They do very low-quality buildings at a very, very cheap price. If we stay in the pure modular building units market, we cannot do anything, because this market is all about pricing, so we have to be very low in price without compromising our quality. With good quality at low prices, we tend to have very small margins. That is why we expanded our turnkey solutions offering where our smaller competitors do not provide the necessary levels of quality.”
The firm is already present in over 20 African countries while continuing to expand in Europe, on its way to becoming the benchmark name in modular construction. To further that goal, Touax has 50 years of experience to draw upon. Including 40 years in Morocco where it has established itself as the leader in modular and industrialised construction, creating a vast reservoir of knowledge and expertise.
That knowledge is being put to work in the Touax factory, which uses Lean Six Sigma methods so that its customers can benefit from exceptional industrial performance by offering modular buildings with the best quality and price ratio on the market.
“Our motto is to be on time, and in full,” La Brelie says. “I do not do anything extraordinary. I believe it should be normal if my customer asks for a guarantee for a given day, that we provide it on that day. We can do that thanks to the Lean Six-Sigma methods.”
As well as ISO 14001 certification, Touax has also achieved ISO 9001 quality certification, and ISO 45001 certification for occupational health and safety.
Of course, this is all made possible by the team that Touax has behind it.
“We have a very good team, very focused, and they love the company,” La Brelie says. “It is like a family. They know what they are working for. We have unions but we do not have an adversarial workers against managers culture. We all work together for a better life for everybody with a very good company culture. We care about customer satisfaction, but we also care about employee satisfaction.”
Journey to Industry Leadership
Touax knows how to get where it needs to be. After all, to be a modular manufacturing business with international reach, a company needs the capability to move whole buildings by water or sea to where they are needed.
The company has laid out a clear strategy to achieve the prominent market position it is aiming for. The foundation of that strategy is the value proposition it offers its customers, a turnkey solution alternative to traditional construction methods within budget and on time. But overall, that strategy can be summarised in two words – volume and margin.
Volume means investing in research and development to create a stronger quality building ecosystem, digital marketing for greater visibility, and a customer focus for higher sales performance. That customer focus includes customer voice analysis, partnership development in Morocco, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea Conakry and Mali, and new developments in the Netherlands, Germany, and Poland.
Margin means product improvements that drive greater customer satisfaction and increasing productivity in its manufacturing and operations to create a more affordable product. It also means developing a sourcing and logistics strategy that integrates the supply chain for customer satisfaction.
It is a vision La Brelie wants to share with the company at every level.
“The workers understand that we work for the satisfaction of our customers. We create more volume and more margin,” he explains.
These values have led to the development of a process that Touax brings to all of its modular construction projects.
The first stage of that process is design, a process that Touax undertakes alongside the customer to create a tailor-made solution following an analysis of their needs and budget with a team of architects and specialist engineers.
“We have an in-house design team who will discuss with the customers what they want,” La Brelie says. “That is what we have an internal design office for.”
Once the design is complete, it is taken to Touax’s factory in Morocco which has a large production capacity, and the flexibility and reactivity necessary to adapt to changing needs on the fly. That flexibility is also possible thanks to the stock of modules and materials it has at its disposal, alongside a wide range of materials and finishes.
Then the next stage is transportation.
“We do the manufacturing piece by piece,” La Brelie explains. “Everything goes into 40-foot-high cube containers that can be combined up to ten modules at a time to create the equivalent of a 150-square-meter building once it has been transported to the site for assembly.”
One of the key aspects of the modular construction model is that assembly is straightforward. However, Touax still maintains a hands-on approach to assembly where possible.
“If we are close to the site we send our own people for final assembly,” La Brelie tells us. “If the site is far away, we send supervisors to oversee assembly and hire people locally.”
Finally, the keys are handed over, on time and in full.
“It is actually more common that there are delays from the customers’ side,” La Brelie confides.
Feeding the Engine
The tools and the talent are in place, but to keep the engine running Touax needs to find customers with projects big enough to feed that engine.
“Every year we work on two or three big projects, the kind of projects like the campus of the University of Morocco, at 16,000 square metres, or the 28 high schools we have built on Côte d’Ivoire covering 3,500 square metres on 35,000 square metres of land. We are working with a basecamp for a big mining project in Guinea that will become the biggest mine in the world, and at a dam in Senegal. The challenge for us is to be able to have one of these big contracts every year, planned in advance.”
