As Infield Systems' latest missive on the FPSO MARKET, released this week, remarked, it was 'an acutely difficult year' for the floater market. More succinctly, those working in this market will be glad to the see back of 2009 as it really feels good to stop banging ones head against the wall.
There were no new orders in the first three quarters of the year and things just began to pick up in Q4. The report made note of a few trends that you would have been aware of by reading SEN - more floaters in the Asian market (see the stories that follow!) and growing interest in new designs (circular units and those with drilling) and, of course, the floating LNG sector.
What a brief review of the report did note of significance is that there any number of currently contracted units that are about to become available. That should certainly depress the market even further, that is until more orders appear on the market.
And what about those contractors? As it happened six of them reported results in the last fortnight. There was some good news as well as bad.
BW OFFSHORE did not actually have a bad year in general, but it saw revenues down 38% to $78mn in Q4, mostly blamed on lower activity by a subsidiary, mooring system specialist APL.
Its floater division (four units in operation) saw revenues rise by 3.5% with an EBITIDA of nearly $21mn, a consider improvement from a loss of $42mn the previous year. By this time next year, BW Pioneer will be operational for Petrobras in the Gulf of Mexico and work will have begun on P-63 for the Petrobras' Papa Terra field.
APL saw its yearly revenue fall by 36% to $274mn, although its margin rose by 20% to 13%. Part of the problem for both APL and BW is that subsidiary Nexus Floating Production now has zero value. APL did pick up the buoy turret loading system contract for Total's Pazflor project. It now sees the market rising in the second half of this year.
Also part owned (23.9%) by BW is PROSAFE PRODUCTION which saw Q4 income rise by 27% to just over $90mn and operating profit up 41% to just over $50mn.
Over at AKER FLOATING PRODUCTION Q4 revenue was up by over one-third to $35mn from the previos year, reflecting higher utilisation of the fpso Dhirubhai-1 which is working for Reliance on the MA field, off the east coast of India.
Similar numbers were produced at FRED OLSEN PRODUCTION - operating revenue up one-third to $107mn and profit up $20mn to $50mn. It also disposed of elderly units Knock Taggart and Nevis and brought Knock Allan into operation on a 1-year charter. FOP saw its 5% stake in EOC (part of Ezra) grow by nearly 50%.
As for market leader SBM OFFSHORE, it managed to hold its own. It saw turnover fall marginally (3%), but EDITIDA was up nearly 16%. The key number in the figures was a rise in its backlog to just over $10bn, but even this does flatter just a bit. its intake of new orders was down by just over 9% from 2009, so it still has some work to do.
And amongst its competitors, it does have the biggest fleet of units, so it is always going to be exposed to the vagaries of units coming off charter.
FROM SUBSEA ENGINEERING NEWS
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