Experience in the Offshore market
Arguably the most specialized,demanding and lucrative area in which our Group has long operated is the worldwide offshore support vessels market (OSV). In recent years the group’s offshore support predominantly AHTS) have participated in operations in Norway,West Africa, Brazil and other places,working for long established companies such as SAIPEM and for the last few years PETROBRAS, an oil giant in it’s own right, currently ranked 4th in the world in that exclusive club.
At present we have completed the second year of operations with a 12,730bhp AHTS vessel, in a four plus secure contract with Petrobras, at a lucrative daily rate, in operations such as tanker lifting, anchor handling and general support for the offshore oil rigs in its concession area.
Establishing the appropriate procedures and best practice rules in such a unique environment as the Brazilian market was a considerable challenge and in the process we added a base of operations and a management team in Brazil. The fruit of such commitment was high performance indexes in a very demanding environment which was duly noted and appreciated by our Charterer.
The track record, was in fact impressive enough to convince Petrobras, a very demanding charterer, to include our group in its exclusive list of suppliers for the ambitious New Building program for the offshore industry, an economic project with worldwide relevance and prestige, awarding 8+8 year firm charters.
In addition to this program however, Petrobras is investing a lot of capital in the field and is constantly offering international Tenders for long term charters (usually 4+4 years) for OSVs at very competitive terms.
Looking at their company position and future development plans they are “obliged” to fix a very large number of vessels to accomplish their stated goals for which venture capital has already been drawn.
Our strategy has been to aggressively expand our operations with Petrobras through these programs that offer secure long term charters at favourable rates, thus allowing us to enlarge our fleet with state of the art vessels and this is a major focus of our activities at present. This process spells a change of pace that redefines the very size and nature of our Group and it is where our future lies.