Interview: Maersk Supply growing in Aberdeen despite expected company sale

OET: Fleet divestment – Maersk Supply Service in December 2016, said it would sell 20 vessels due to oversupply in the market. Is the target still 20 vessels, has this increased? 

Harris: The number of vessels in the divestment program hasn’t increased. If opportunities arise then we will still consider vessels that are within our portfolio, but certainly, our plan is still to consider and actively divest tonnage that is old and is becoming obsolete.

As vessels go, we’re still welcoming new vessels into the fleet, so we have a 10 vessel newbuild program. It’s continually changing as some move in, some move-out but overall the net effect is that we’ll be around 40-45 vessels by the end of the program.

The last vessel that we have coming in will be in 2019 by the end of the first half. That will be the delivery of our ten new vessels. With the divestment program, the timeline for that is a bit less clear, because there’s a number of issues behind that, it takes time, about responsibly recycling and making sure to place the vessel to places we’re happy with.

OET: You don’t want to make those vessels competitors to Maersk Supply Service. You’ve sold some of them to a company that’s converting OSVs to offshore mobile power plants?

Harris: It’s interesting what some of these people have done with the vessels. When we sell them, we make sure there’s no chance of them coming back to compete with us, otherwise, there’s absolutely no point in selling them.

About the power generation, I find it personally very interesting project. A company in Turkey has taken one of the vessels to a remote coastal village and put a lot of electricity generators on the back of the vessel, using it to provide power to a number of homes.

It’s good to see there’s some use of the tonnage at the end of the day but we’re glad it’s not in the oil and gas, competing with is.

OET: Maersk Supply Service is divesting its old tonnage but is also taking in new Starfish and Stingrays. Can you share more on the programs, how many of them are (going to be) working in the UK?

Harris: The Starfish are the anchor handlers and there’s six of them being built in the Kleven yard in Norway. We’ve currently got three operational. Two of them have been working in the UK and have now gone on the charter in Australia with Quadrant.

And we have the third one working within the UK at the moment. The fourth one is going to be delivered by the end of May. And she will commence work in the UK. We’ll have two of the M-class Starfish work in the UK, and then by 1h of 2019, the other two will be delivered.

We haven’t got any firm plans for them at the moment but there’s certainly a lot of interest for them in both the UK and in Australia. So, we’ll see where they end up. Brazil is also a market we’re interested in, but we are actively seeking opportunities for the last two at the moment.

As far as the Stingray vessels go, they’ve come out of the Cosco yard in China, We’re very happy with them. Maersk as a company is very used to building vessels in China. The build quality we have has been very, very good. 9.5 million man-hours without a LTI during the construction. We’ve been very pleased with how that turned out.

These vessels are a bit of a break from the traditional anchor handling vessels that Maersk Supply Service have, so we’ve kind of branched into bigger and more construction-oriented vessel.

The first one of these has already been working for McDermott, Maersk Installer in India and the fourth one that has been delivered is committed to a long-term contract in Mexico for Blue Marine Group. We’re actively bidding a number of opportunities for the other three when they come out as well.

There is a huge amount of interest in these new vessels that we have. Nobody else is committing to new tonnage.

There is a huge amount of interest in these new vessels that we have. Nobody else is committing to new tonnage. We were probably the last people to commit to the brand-new tonnage of a significant nature, so until the market picks up and there’s a horizon on sustained return on capital investment then nobody else is likely to be speculatively committing to vessels.

These are likely to be the newest vessels that people are going to have access to for the next three-four-five years. And while some of the vessels in our peer group have been around a long time, by the time you get to projects kicking off in the next four to five years, these other vessels that we’re competing with are going to be quite aged.

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