In 2010, Kylie Minogue launched the controversial video for her hit single “All the Lovers”, which features a diverse cast of models writhing around in their underwear whilst a white horse trots through downtown Los Angeles, and the Aussie pop star belts out, “Don't be frightened, just give me a little bit more, they don't compare, all the lovers.”
Rather than all the lovers, we have an analysis of all the lovely offshore deals this week. Several of the sellers have achieved a little bit more than anyone expected possible, and the prices paid really don’t compare to the depressed asset prices at which some of the sellers acquired the ships they offloaded now.
As Ms Minogue puts it, “Can't you see that this is going higher, higher, higher, higher?”
I suspect she is right regarding the direction of the offshore market, as the big players gear up for the ongoing auction of Seacor Marine.
With its current price of US$8.75 per share, Seacor has a market capitalisation of just US$237 million, meaning that Tidewater (with a current market capitalisation of US$3.5 billion) could acquire Seacor and its fleet of 37 vessels simply by issuing another seven per cent of its own shares to Seacor’s disgruntled stockholders. They’d get liquidity, Tidewater could refinance Seacor’s approximately US$300 million of debt at lower interest rates, and, of course, there would be significant “synergies” in the shore management and crew costs when Tidewater applied the axe.
But that deal is in the future and the outcome is unknown. I can hear Kylie whispering in my ear, “Breathe, I know you find it hard but, baby, breathe,” so we turn to three benchmark transactions already on the record.
President Donald Trump’s tariffs have made it harder and more expensive for American consumers to buy Canadian goods. Fifty per cent duties apply on a wide range of Canadian products when they are imported to the USA, covering everything from beer and whiskey to mopeds and motor vehicles, fishing rods, vinyl floor tiles, whey products and even ice hockey sticks, as well as lumber and paper, steel, aluminium and copper.
But these punitive and unpopular tariffs have not stopped one family buying Canadian, even if they are not bringing their purchases through customs to their home state of Louisiana. We refer of course to the Chouests, the owners of Edison Chouest, the second largest offshore support vessel owner in the world, which purchased Canada’s Horizon Maritime Services last month for an undisclosed sum.
As we reported, Horizon Maritime's fleet includes the 300 ton bollard pull anchor handling tug supply vessel (AHTS) Horizon Arctic, the ice-classed, DP2, 3,300DWT platform supply vessel (PSV) Horizon Dragon (former Island Dragon, as it was until 2024) and Polar Prince, a medium-duty icebreaker which appears to have been built in 1959 (“a long-established record,” according to Horizon’s website).
The company also operates three ice-class tugs (Horizon Glacier, Chinook and Aurora) and runs a supply base in Mulgrave, Nova Scotia, as well as joint ventures with indigenous communities, including Qikiqtaaluk Horizon Arctic Services. The latter chartered the Polar Class 3 icebreaker Nordica, which recently made its first port call in Iqaluit.
The move is significant for a number of reasons:
Firstly, there seems to be an un-reciprocal injustice that an American vessel owner can own a Canadian shipowner like Horizon and operate vessels in Canada, but a Canadian shipowner cannot buy an American one and operate vessels in American waters due to the Jones Act, America’s restrictive cabotage law that prevents foreign owners from acquiring American vessels in the domestic trade.
How long will this anomaly be allowed to stand, even if the "blue tsunami" of anti-Trump legislators elected in the midterms is able to exercise greater control over American trade policy to treat Canada more fairly?
Secondly, the deal is a sign that Edison Chouest (which never went bankrupt in the industry downturn and is privately held, so it does not publicly disclose its financial results) is in expansion mode. In May, it paid US$107.5 million for Helix Energy Solutions’ Gulf of Mexico-focused shallow water abandonment business. Now it is splashing another triple-digit million dollar amount on a large AHTS and a PSV and the rest of Horizon. Will it also emerge as the winner of the Seacor sale process?
Thirdly, the deal means that Edison Chouest has re-established a foothold in Africa, Tidewater’s stronghold and its most important and profitable market, but also Seacor’s largest and most important market. This is because Horizon Dragon is working in Angola, believed to be on charter to TotalEnergies. We understand that Chouest has hired commercial staff to develop business in Africa and it will continue to work with the founders of Horizon, Sean Leet, and Steve Widmeyer.
Seacor would fit nicely with this footprint if Chouest wanted to expand beyond its Western Hemisphere markets of the USA, Guyana, Suriname and Brazil.
Why was Chouest able to acquire the business now at a time when large AHTS are claiming super premium rates in international markets?
Mr Leet and Mr Widemeyer founded the business with funding from CFFI Ventures, owned by John Risley, a Nova Scotia-based seafood magnate.
Unfortunately, in February, it emerged that CFFI Ventures owed more than US$776 million, as per CBC reporting. Its assets included a proposed wind-powered hydrogen operation in western Newfoundland, the part ownership of Horizon Maritime, and a shareholding in the skin care company SkinFix. Mr Risley was romantically engaged with Amy Gordinier-Regan, the founder of SkinFix, and formerly the marketing director of Jo Malone, the British perfumier.
Unfortunately, the financing for Horizon smelt fishy and the business needed a cash fix, not cosmetic improvements (I could not resist that pun, I apologise).
“CFFI does not believe that its assets can be monetised in the near term," CBC reported an affidavit from CFFI's vice-president and chief financial officer, Brittany Bartlett, had stated, and that the value of its assets was not enough to cover its debts.
This led to its creditor, New York-based private lender HPS Investment Partners, stepping in to provide bridging finance until the stake in Horizon could be sold to Chouest to pay back some of the debts. It is not clear what has happened to the ownership of SkinFix, which would have been a rash purchase by Chouest anyway, nor to Mr Risley’s relationship with Ms Gordinier-Regan. Triple lipid-peptide cream, anyone?
This is the second big transaction in the Canadian offshore sector following the spinoff of the offshore division of Mr Leet’s former employer, Atlantic Towing, which he left in 2015 to found Horizon.
As we reported, in September, Atlantic’s Canadian parent company, JD Irving, sold the division and its fleet of four PSVs and the 200-ton bollard pull AHTS Atlantic Merlin working off Newfoundland to a fund managed by JP Morgan, which renamed the business Sterling Atlantic Offshore. So now all the main players offshore Canada are foreign-owned (the third player is Norway’s DOF). Again, JP Morgan did not disclose the price it paid for Sterling Atlantic Offshore.
Don't be frightened, I will just give you a little bit more on a US$86 million deal in Brazil.
Usually, it is Norwegian-born tanker magnate John Fredriksen who makes outrageously large sums of money flipping assets for huge profits (as we have seen with the bumper profits at Frontline this year).
Imagine our surprise to find that OceanPact CBO, Brazil’s largest offshore vessel owner, has played the Cypriot maestro’s own game using tonnage it acquired from him for a pittance in 2021 and early 2022 when the industry was weak and he was a seller after his effort to make a quick flip had failed.
The vessels are the 1,000-square-metre clear deck PSVs CBO Wiser and CBO Energy, which CBO bought from John Fredriksen’s Seatankers Management for just under US$18 million apiece five years or so back, when the 4,900DWT vessels were known as Sea Hornbill and Sea Heron.
The PSVs have had a long and tangled history - they were originally ordered by Malaysian speculator Nam Cheong in 2013 for a price of US$31m each, only for Seatankers to pick them up for US$19m each in 2018, a classic case of Mr Fredriksen acquiring quality ships in deep distress in the middle of an industry recession as resales, but Seatankers did not take full delivery of the PSVs from the yard until 2021 and 2022, as we reported at the time of the sale. But his patience failed him, and the Brazilians have now reaped the benefits of the market recovery with a massive one-off capital gain on the sale.
OceanPact CBO has flipped the five-year-old ships for an unbelievable US$43 million each, effectively the equivalent cost of a newbuild, to an unknown foreign buyer, with the deal due to close before on December 18. CBO will continue operating CBO Wiser for its current client in Brazil via a bareboat charter under the same contractual terms after the sale into early 2027, we understand.
The buyer is believed to be Bourbon, although this has not been confirmed, and it is speculated by those with whom I have spoken that the ships may be earmarked for long-term charters in Guyana with ExxonMobil with whom the French operator already won a five-year charter for the similar-sized Bourbon Calm in late 2025, as we reported. For now, the identity of the buyers is officially unconfirmed and the true buyers are most welcome to contact us if they wish to correct me.
As with Edison Chouest, it is clear that Bourbon is through the worst after extensive pain and fleet shrinkage from the ongoing ICBC auctions.
Last week, the French company announced that it had taken delivery of two new 34-metre-long fast crewboats from Grandweld Shipyards in Dubai. The units are designed to transport offshore personnel, with a passenger capacity of 60, business-class-style seats (presumably not flat bed ones, although the mind boggles) and an eFMS system for improved fuel efficiency. The new units offer optimised performance with a cruising speed of up to 38 knots, and have been chartered to ExxonMobil in Angola, once they exit the Strait of Hormuz safety.
Bourbon is back, baby.
One of the biggest mysteries of recent years has been how Greek tanker titan Capital and its containership-owning compatriot Costamare would actually manage and operate the ten large PSV newbuildings of various designs that they have each ordered in China, including options.
Capital has ordered both MMC and Breeze design PSVs at Fujian Mawei for Capital, and Costamare and its partner Ugland of Norway have firmed up eight Salt Ship vessel orders at Paxocean Zhoushan, as per the yard’s information. Capital’s solution was to acquire ship manager UOS of Germany to support the operation and marketing of its ships.
We noted two weeks ago that newbuild PSVs were struggling to find work, despite the strong overall market. The first wave of Chinese newbuilding 800-square-metre clear deck vessels from Simon Laing’s Sinopacific have found work in Nigeria at only lacklustre rates.
The 1,000-square-metre clear deck vessel FS Hercules won a short-term charter with Saipem in Northern Europe (code for “I don’t know where exactly”) and has now retreated to Gdansk to have a 70-ton subsea crane fitted, although this is unlikely to transform its marketability.
The first Capital vessel Ace Aristotelis, another DP2, 1,000-square-metre, diesel-electric PSV fresh from the yard in China, is now westbound from Singapore to Las Palmas in the Canary Islands with an ETA of November 25 as per AIS. It does not have a charter and will arrive in the North Sea just in time for the winter slump in rates that usually happens every year.
Seacor’s two newbuild hybrid PSVs will also be delivered from China in the next few months before the Lunar New Year and both are also currently unfixed.
Now LD Armateurs (formerly Louis Dreyfus Armateurs; LDA) has arrived to save Costamare from embarrassment. The French cable specialist, now owned by private equity, announced last week that it would be buying three of the Salt design Costamare vessels straight from the slipway, so the Greek owners won’t need to take delivery and go to the trouble of chartering them.
LDA will convert the trio into cable-laying vessels dedicated to the installation and repair of subsea telecommunications cables. Given the buoyancy of the market for data cable installation and repair, which we highlighted in August, this looks like an excellent project for LDA.
“Building on 25 years of experience in the installation and repair of subsea telecommunications cables on behalf of our clients, LDA has decided to invest in its own fleet of next-generation cable vessels," Samira Draoua, Chief Executive Officer of LD Armateurs, commented. "Our ambition is to support the sustained growth of the telecommunications sector, help address critical infrastructure sovereignty challenges, and proactively meet the modernisation needs of a global fleet facing both aging assets and capacity constraints."
Readers with sharp memories will recall that Ms Draoua was previously the CEO of French towage operator Les Abeilles, which was also owned by the same private equity fund before growing its fleet and being sold to Boluda in 2024.
LDA said that the three PSVs are scheduled for delivery from PaxOcean during the second quarter of 2027. They will then be transferred to a conversion yard, where they will be equipped with the specialised systems required for cable operations, before entering service in early 2028. The ships will be fitted with a cable-carrying capacity of 2,800 tonnes to perform both cable installation and repair.
As per its fleet website, LDA manages seven cable ships for Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN) being five cable-layers and two maintenance vessels (all with the “Ile” name prefix), as well as managing one cable-layer and four maintenance capable vessels for the Optic Marine Group.
The Costamare purchases would not be LDA’s first conversions of PSVs into the cable sector. In 2019, the company acquired and then converted the former Toisa Warrior (built in 2011) into Ile D’Ouessant for ASN, and the former 2006-built PSV ex-Caledonian Vision was transformed into Ile de Molene in 2021.
The new acquisition thus serves many purposes. It returns cash to Costamare and defers their PSV problem to later in 2027, when the remaining vessels could probably be flipped to a Brazilian owner with a newbuilding position like Starnav, which would then benefit from the duty-free transfer of the newbuilds to the Brazilian registry. It gives LDA the hockey stick growth in fleet and future revenues which private equity investors love to provide in their pitch books as they exit the business.
So, three big deals in the space of two weeks, with the Seacor process still brewing. To paraphrase Ms Minogue, love offshore is really good, you just want more…. Even if it throws you to the fire, fire, fire, fire.
Let’s hope nobody gets burnt and that this market is going higher, higher, higher, higher.
Didn’t like this week’s column? Why not watch “Sorry” by Madonna?