A STROLL DOWN THE MEMORY LANE
Looking towards to the future, being at present, let’s reminisce about the early years of USS through the memories of Mr. Gary Soon, one of the company pioneers.
For a start, let’s make sure everyone gets the pronunciation of our company name correct: It’s ‘you+trah+con’ and not Ultra-con or Wootrah-con. Do ensure that you pronounce the name correctly from this point onwards!
Now, a little history of Utracon:
1998 marks the birth of UTRACON STRUCTURAL SYSTEMS PTE LTD. It was incorporated on 14th February 1998. Yes, on a Valentine’s Day, with love.
It all started when two engineers planned to set up the 1st home grown prestressing and bridge specialist in Singapore way back in 1998. Then, Mr. Mark Wong and Mr. SC Kuah were embarking on an almost impossible task as such a set-up would require a huge financial outlay due to its heavy investment in human resources and machineries/equipment. That was when these two businessmen-to-be met Dr. Tan of Utraco Pte Ltd (UPL) for a business partnership, and as the saying goes, the rest is history!
For the curious-minded, “Utraco” was unofficially the acronym of “Universal Trading Company”, the supposedly original trade engaged by Utraco in its early years of incorporation some 40 years ago.
In 2000, the Management decided to revamp the logo. To reflect vibrancy – it was decided that the logo should consist of two to three colours. After much brainstorming, our 2nd generation corporate logo was then born.
At the initial stages, sharing the same name and the same logo with UPL was not really an issue. However, confusion arose when USS started to establish its name overseas. Overseas clients were having difficulties to distinguish between UPL and USS when they went online to search for UTRACO. Therefore in 2007, an agreement was reached to make things clear. USS would add an “N” to “UTRACO” as an unofficial acronym of “Universal Trading and Construction”. USS also chose to keep the corporate logo. Thus, our company’s name was changed from UTRACO STRUCTURAL SYSTEMS to UTRACON STRUCTURAL SYSTEMS.
More to come in the next issue!
We would like to thank Mr.Gary, Mr. Alfred Wong, Mr. Loh PS and others for sparing their time in showing us UTRACON’s history.
- Huei Xing & Gary Soon-
History TIMELINE
USS Singapore was incorporated on 14/2/1998
1998
2000
USS Malaysia was incorporated
USS adopted new logo
2002
Office moved to 7E Pioneer Sector 1
USSS obtained ISO 9000
2004
USS India was incorporated in Hyderabad
Umagz/November, 2015