Mark GJ Beretta

Founder and Chief Technologist

Mark Beretta’s working career started in 1987 in South Africa at Haggie Rand Limited, at the time one of the largest steel wire rope manufacturers in the world. Initially employed as a Trainee Metallurgist, Mark's career progressed over a twelve year period with this company, rising to Technical Manager and gaining experience in R&D, process control and project management of multi-million dollar projects. In 1999,  an exciting opportunity presented itself in SE Asia and Mark and his family left South Africa to start a new challenge abroad.

In Singapore, Mark took up the position of Business Development Director at Kim Teck Leong Pty Ltd (KTL), a small, family owned and run rigging company – with huge potential. At the time, KTL was offering standard rigging and steel wire rope slings up to 4” diameter.

Over the course of the next 20 years, Mark developed the company and its personnel into a world class rigging company with exemplary technical and production capability, producing slings up to 18" diameter. The company rebranded as KTL Offshore in mid-2000 and listed on the main board of the Singapore Stock Exchange in 2007.

Under Mark's guidance, KTL became a giant in the heavy lift industry, supplying slings to the world’s largest contractors including McDermott, Heerema, Saipem, NPCC, Technip, Subsea 7, EMAS and many more.

During 2011, Mark made a major strategic move for the company by developing the technology for synthetic slings. KTL rapidly developed this market and became one of only a handful of rigging companies that could offer a heavy lift, synthetic sling. This culminated in the Badamyar project in 2016, where the world’s largest synthetic slings were used for an offshore project in Myanmar (each sling had an individual rated strength in excess of 5,000 metric tons). With the successful completion of this ground-breaking project, KTL's name was etched in history forever. The company became renowned throughout the industry for accepting and successfully executing the most challenging lifting projects!

In 2019, Mark relocated with his family to the UK where he started the company Pioneer Slings Limited with a mission to provide a select few rigging companies with the advanced lifting technology to enable specialized, engineered sling manufacture.

Pioneer Slings Limited provides a versatile offering of technical and marketing competencies combined with strategic vision that has been the hallmark of Mark Beretta’s career in rigging spanning 35 years.