TAN Sri Shahril Shamsuddin hasn’t changed one bit from the time we first met some 8 years ago. At the age of 52, the oil and gas magnate has not lost his charm or his sense of humour.

After walking briskly into the restaurant, Shahril took his seat and broke out into laughter after saying in jest that he and his partner Datuk Mokhzani Mahathir are the biggest debtors in town.

(SapuraKencana has long-term debt of RM3.7bil and short-term debt of RM7.2bil).

It’s not that the company is in any way sinking under its indebtedness. SapuraKencana Petroleum Bhd, of which Shahril and Mokhzani are owners and the top executives of the company, has an order book totalling RM25bil.

With Shahril holding some 20% of the company via Sapura Holdings, and at SapuraKencana’s share price of RM3.79, Shahril is worth roughly RM4.5bil. He and his brother Shahriman are No. 12 on the 2013 Forbes Malaysia rich list.

Corporate Malaysia knows Shahril as the eldest son of Tan Sri Shamsuddin Abdul Kadir. Shamsuddin built Sapura Holdings from the ground up into one of the country’s largest privately-held conglomerates that employed 4,500 people at that time.

Since the early nineties, the then 30-year old Shahril began to take over the reins from his father.

Shahril feels it has been his innate character to want to achieve big things and he looks to his father as a mentor in preparing him for bigger responsibilities.

“For sure, my father was my mentor. Looking at him work hard for the sole purpose of educating his children gave me a very strong drive to be like him. I saw him employ so many people. I saw him being satisfied, not just from the profits made by the company but from providing jobs for so many people,”

Shahril also names Datuk Rameli Musa (Ingress Corp Bhd executive director) and Khoo Soo Keong as his other two mentors.

Shahril says that when people were talking about empowerment in the eighties, his mentors had been practising them in the seventies.

SapuraKencana may have a market capitalisation of RM22bil today with assets worth RM15bil and 11,000 employees, but being a juggernaut was never Shahril’s plan. It started off simply with the desire to create an organisation that was technically very strong and accorded value to customers.

“A team of us got together and asked what kind of service was underserved in Malaysia? In the late nineties, there were hardly any oil and gas service providers and we were an oil-producing country.

“So to us, it was putting together a team and filling that gap. While others were very interested in IT, we exited that area and went into oil and gas. Not many people understood the business at that time. Becoming a juggernaut was an outcome of doing things the right way. We put in the capabilities and capital. We were very committed in doing it ourselves.”

On the issue of connections and how SapuraKencana grows more from know-who, Shahril says people can say whatever they want. “Then I must know many people because we serve 20 countries. The biggest market right now is Brazil, which is 60% of our orderbook. I guess people know that we can deliver and we have a good track record,” says Shahril.