Ecosse Subsea Boosts Revenues

Ecosse Subsea, the parent company of subsea technology specialist, Ecosse Subsea Systems, (ESS) said it has more than doubled turnover to £27.7m and increased underlying earnings according to annual accounts lodged at Companies House.

Financial results to March 31, 2017 show the Aberdeenshire firm, which provides a range of engineering, technical, equipment hire, fabrication and manpower services to the renewables, interconnector and oil and gas industries, ramped up turnover from £12.7m to £27.7m. EBITDA rose to £7m.

ESS said the strong financial performance was a result of previous R&D spend of more than £10m and increased adoption of its SCAR technologies for offshore renewables and interconnector projects, aligned to growth in oil and gas engineering activities.

ESS chairman, Mike Wilson, said: “We have concluded a number of major offshore wind farm projects and interconnector contracts in the last year and our greatly increased market share is reflected in these excellent results.”

Managing director, Mark Gillespie, said: “We continue to invest significantly in R&D which will generate future returns in 2018 and beyond, an example of which is our new trenching tool SCARJet in which we have already invested a large proportion of 2017 profits.

“In the current financial year we have already secured an order backlog in excess of £20m and we are forecasting that 2018 figures will continue on an upward trajectory. Changes we made to strengthen our management team earlier this year are already paying dividends and as these results show, we are primed to push on and take ESS to the next stage of its evolution.

“Revenues in Europe over the last financial year grew to more than £9m and this expansion out with our traditional UK market signals we have a strong offering which has a wider appeal across a range of major international subsea construction projects.

“Our focus will be on consolidating our leading position in the subsea energy sector and expanding our geographic footprint in to the Baltic, Asia and North America subsea markets.”

ESS, which owns County Durham-based fabrication subsidiary MASfab, employs 40 staff but the workforce extends to more than 90 at times of peak deployment on project work.