SREE at Middle East Energy 2026, Dubai: What Transformer Makers Asked Us About

From 1 to 3 September 2026 SREE exhibited at Middle East Energy at the Dubai World Trade Centre, in the show’s 50th anniversary year, on stand Z2.G18 in Zabeel Hall 2. Three of us went from Nantong: Fenglun Zhang from the international business side, Pei Linlin from engineering, and Allen Feng from international sales. This is a short account of what we brought and what people asked about, written mainly for the transformer makers who stopped by and for those who could not.

What was on the stand

A standard 15 m² stand does not fit a cut-to-length line, so we brought the line in pictures, videos and one piece of software. The six panels covered our current range: the cut-and-stack combined line that cuts laminations and builds the core in one machine, the automatic core stacking machine, cut-to-length lines in the 200 to 1000 width classes, the silicon steel slitting line, a complete CRGO core manufacturing solution from coil storage to finished core, and a panel we called “From core drawing to slitting plan”, which is the software side of what we do.

That last panel got the most time at the table. We ran the demonstration from a real lamination drawing: the drawing goes in, the software produces the piece list with step-lap lengths and quantities, turns it into a cutting programme for the line, and works out the slitting plan for the master coil. For a core shop that still does this by hand in a spreadsheet, seeing it done in a few minutes is usually the moment the conversation changes from “what do you sell” to “how would this work on our drawings”.

Who came

Visitors to the stand were a fair sample of the transformer industry around the Gulf and beyond: transformer manufacturers and their procurement people, core service and repair companies, EPC contractors and trading houses. Over the three days we talked with companies from the UAE and the wider Gulf, India, Pakistan, Turkey and Brazil, and several conversations continued afterwards on WhatsApp and by email.

The questions that came up again and again

Trade shows are useful less for what you say than for what you are asked. Three themes came up at almost every serious conversation.

Single machines before complete lines

Interest in slitting lines, core tilting tables and individual machines was stronger than interest in complete core shops. Many of the plants we spoke to run older cutting lines that still work and are looking for the one machine that removes their current bottleneck, whether that is slitting master coils in-house instead of buying slit strip, or getting cores off the stacking table faster. It is a reminder that a core shop is built one machine at a time; the slitting versus cut-to-length article covers the usual first step.

Thinner steel on existing lines

Several visitors described the same situation: loss specifications are pushing them towards 0.23, 0.20 and 0.18 mm grades, and their existing lines were bought for 0.27 or 0.30 mm. The question is whether the old line can run the thin material or whether the line has to change. The honest answer depends on the line, and we wrote it up afterwards in processing thin CRGO on a cut-to-length line.

Service in the region

The most direct question came from a Turkish visitor interested in a slitting line: who comes when the machine stops? We answered with what we do today, which is spare parts from Nantong, remote diagnosis of the control system, and engineers travelling from China for installation, commissioning and repairs, as we are doing this month in India. We do not yet have a service point in Turkey or the Gulf, and we said so. It is the clearest piece of feedback we took home.

What we took home

Beyond the follow-ups, which are under way, two things. First, the demonstration from a real core drawing works better than any product panel, so it will be the centre of the stand next time. Second, the people who got the most out of the show were the ones we had written to before it; a trade show is a good place to continue a conversation and a poor place to start one, and we will plan the next one accordingly.

In the two weeks since the show we have sent line proposals for 400- and 600-class cut-to-length lines and for slitting lines to companies we met in Dubai and to enquiries that followed the show, and the conversations with the Brazilian, Pakistani and Indian visitors are continuing. If you visited the stand and have not heard from us, or if you did not make it to Dubai and would like the material, the technical resources page has the datasheets and the селектор строк takes about five minutes.