Last week, we looked at two companies going from strength to strength, being subsea leader DOF and its efforts to move up the value chain from vessel owner to complex project management and service delivery selling platform supply vessels (PSVs) and buying, and Harald Moræus-Hanssen’s Uthalden investment company, which is amassing a fleet of older North Sea PSVs and anchor handlers to benefit from the surging charter rates there.
This week, we were going to look at some of the industry laggards, with ever-troubled BP announcing it plans to exit the North Sea and sell all its production assets there – part of yet another restructuring by the British major.
We also wanted to study the deal struck by our friends at Keppel to sell ten abandoned rigs from its imaginatively named Rigco subsidiary to a new joint venture with American investment firm Apollo for around S$3.7 billion (US$2.87 billion). Of course, none of the rigs were named, or valued individually, and the whole deal is shrouded in secrecy on specifics, just as the creation of Rigco in the first place was mystifying and poorly disclosed as we noted in December 2024. However, Keppel will book an accounting loss of US$71 million from the divestment of the six operational rigs in its first-half results scheduled on July 30, so it is clearly still not making money on a string of disastrous deals conceived more than a decade ago.
But then, finally we saw news about a different Keppel-linked company. News we have been waiting for since we first covered the cable sector in our Crossed Wires piece in August 2021.
One company that has been passed around more than… (do not under any circumstances make a sexist and misogynistic Melania Trump joke here, please) the eponymous Dutchie in the Musical Youth song is telecoms cable lay and data cable repair specialist Global Marine Group (GMG). GMG is a case study in short-term tactical management destroying a market leading position.
This is a company with a long and storied history as the pioneer of subsea cable-laying, which has been owned over the last century, in various forms, starting as Cable and Wireless Marine, by the British Government, a now-disgraced American dot-com entrepreneur of dubious ethics named Gary Winnick, then a series of private equity houses since 2004, before finally finding a new owner last year, Singapore’s real-estate focused Keppel Infrastructure Fund (KIF).
GMG’s predecessor companies had an incredible technical track record. In 1988, they installed the first trans-Atlantic fibre optic submarine cable, TAT-8, and a year later they laid the first private transatlantic fibre optic submarine cable, PTAT.
The next year (1990) the company inaugurated the first trans-Pacific fibre optic submarine cable, NPC. Cable and Wireless Marine was the first player to plough an unarmoured cable over 1,000 kilometres in one single, continuous operation between Brunei and Singapore. In 1994, it was the first to post-lay bury a cable in 2,000 metres of water, the Pacific Rim West data system.
As the dot-com bubble inflated, the company installed the first dedicated internet cable between the US and the UK in 1997. To date, sources claim that GMG has installed over 300,000 kilometres of subsea cable, 23 per cent of the world's total, and, in addition to this, Global Marine with joint venture partners have performed 35 per cent of maintenance operations on worldwide fibre optic cables.
KIF is part owner of the Bifrost cable system, along with Meta (the company behind Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp) and an Indonesian telecoms player. Bifrost spans over 20,000 kilometres from the west coast of the US across the Pacific via Guam, to directly connect to Singapore and Indonesia through the Java Sea and Celebes Sea.
As we reported earlier this month, the Bifrost data cables are now fully leased out and provide over 240 Yerabits per second of trans-Pacific capacity for AI and cloud computing. Having a cable lay and cable repair company provides synergy and integration for KIF, which also owns data-centres and IT related property.
We have already highlighted that the asset-stripped carcass of GMG needed urgent investment if it was to remain in existence in the medium term. We noted that, “Global Marine’s aged fleet will need at least US$1 billion of new investment simply for the company to continue operating to the end of the decade,” and observed how its competitors were investing aggressively in both cable lay and cable repair vessels.
Today, GMG’s current fleet of six cable-lay and repair vessels consists entirely of vessels that were built between 1995 and 2001, which would make them obsolete in any other sector of the offshore industry. Shocking to say, the youngest cable-layer in the Global Marine fleet, Normand Clipper, was built in 2001 and was previously chartered in from Solstad Maritime, where it was the oldest ship in the Solstad fleet. Then GMG purchased it in June of this year, when the firm period of the charter ended, and renamed it CS Clipper. Solstad said it would book a profit of US$10 million on the sale of the 25-year-old vessel.
KIF correctly spotted an opportunity due to the huge increases in global data traffic. The Singaporean fund identified that both the cable lay and cable repair markets are booming. When it bought GMG, KIF noted that, “the market for maintenance and installation services is poised to grow at about 45 per cent compound annual growth rate from 2023 to 2029. This comes on the back of rising global demand for connectivity and the limited supply of specialised vessels.”
KIF is correct that the macro picture is excellent. The outlook for cable lay and cable repair is splendid.
DSI Advisory Services, a competitive intelligence firm, recently highlighted the growing demand for both cable repair and cable installation in a report titled, “The repair crisis: sixty ships, five hundred cables and a queue that never ends”. This is a must-read for anyone doing business development in the subsea space and probably for GMG’s directors, as they seek approval for further investment to keep the company alive. The needs of AI and the ever-growing global demand for bandwidth and data feed the need for cableships of all types.
DSI’s report opens with a startling and very well-written introduction, which summarises the problem facing anyone who uses the internet:
“Imagine discovering that ninety-five per cent of all intercontinental data — every financial transaction, every military communication, every video call between continents — travels through cables thinner than a garden hose, laid on the ocean floor. Now imagine discovering that when those cables break, as they do roughly two hundred times a year, the entire planet depends on a fleet of approximately sixty ships to fix them. Ships that are, on average, older than the engineers who crew them.
"This is not a hypothetical. This is the state of the world's submarine cable repair infrastructure in 2026, and it is approaching a breaking point that most governments have not yet begun to take seriously.”
Some of the recent cases of data cable damage appear to have been more than accidents or misfortunes and global subsea infrastructure security is a hot topic, one presciently and implausibly highlighted by former British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak way back in 2017.
In 2023 and 2024, there was damage to a gas pipeline, data traffic and electricity supplies in the Baltic Sea caused by three different vessels (the Cook Islands-flagged Shadow Fleet oil tanker Eagle S, the Hong Kong-flagged container vessel Newnew Polar Bear and the Chinese-flagged bulker Yi Peng 3) on three separate occasions, resulting from anchors dragging on the seabed.
These mishaps involving-both Russian and Chinese-linked vessels in the Baltic provoked a strong reaction from the littoral states whose cables were cut, but making any charges stick proved extremely difficult.
China permitted some investigators to interview the crew of Yi Peng 3 for a few hours before it sailed away but then did nothing. Finland detained Eagle S and prosecutors there charged the captain and two deck officers with sabotage. However, in October 2025, a Helsinki court threw out the cases against the ship's Georgian Master Davit Vadatchkoria and his officers Robert Egizaryan and Santosh Kumar Chaurasia, saying the incident occurred in international waters outside Finland's jurisdiction.
Only in Hong Kong was action taken against 43-year-old Wan Wenguo, master of NewNew Polar Bear, who denied one count of criminal damage and two summonses issued by the Hong Kong Marine Department at a hearing in the Eastern Magistrates’ Courts on July 10. Magistrate Chu Man-hon adjourned proceedings to August 10 to allow the defence time to obtain expert reports. Captain Wan remains in custody in Hong Kong, as per the local media. We’ll keep you posted.
There has been much concern (often correctly) amongst seafarers about the criminalisation of crew. However, in cases where millions of dollars of damage are caused to subsea cables and pipelines by ships in suspicious circumstances, officers should be accountable for their actions. But often they are not.
Another incident occurred in the waters off Taiwan in January 2025 when a (surprise!) Cameroonian-flagged rust bucket Shunxin-39 severed data cables whilst seemingly spoofing its AIS, as per excellent Windward investigations (covered here). This was all a big accident, according to the vessel’s Chinese owner in Hong Kong.
As usual, the vessel sailed away without the Taiwanese authorities being able to obtain redress.
In February 2024, three telecoms cables were severed in the Red Sea. These were likely cut when the anchor of the stricken bulk carrier Rubymar dragged after the ship was abandoned by its crew following a Houthi missile strike. Rubymar drifted uncontrolled for two weeks before it finally sank.
Twenty-five per cent of traffic between Asia and Europe was disrupted as per DSI. Due to the civil war in Yemen and the attacks on shipping, it took five months for the repair of the AAE-1 cable to be completed.
Sometimes the problems are of natural origin. In March 2024, four cables were cut simultaneously off Ivory Coast after seismic activity on the seabed, which resulted in thirteen African countries losing connectivity, including Ivory Coast which suffered an almost complete blackout of the internet. The repair took up to eight weeks, as the repair vessels had to sail from Europe and collect spare cable en route to the sites of the damage, which took more than two weeks before the work could start.
Recent events have thus shown that the vulnerability of subsea cables on which so much of modern life and global business depends. Telegeography estimated that in the next decade, 15 replacement cable repair ships need to be ordered to replace the ageing world fleet, and five additional ships are needed to serve the increased number of cables that will be installed as subsea internet infrastructure increases to accommodate increased demand.
With the power of Keppel behind GMG, with Singapore’s status as a major regional business centre and with the sovereign wealth fund of the Lion City, Temasek Holdings, being a major investor in the big internet and AI companies that own or lease the big new data cables, you would think it would be a slam dunk for GMG to build a strong business case to invest in new tonnage.
Er, no. Instead, it was the French who have taken the lead.
Orange Marine, the cable division of French telecoms group Orange, announced last year that it had awarded a shipbuilder in Sri Lanka a contract for the construction of two new cable laying and cable maintenance vessels. These will be sister ships to Sophie Germain, which was delivered in 2023.
The new Orange cable layer pair will be fitted with diesel‑electric hybrid propulsion with backup batteries, azimuthing thrusters, shore power capability, and ROVs for inspection/burial. They are scheduled for delivery in 2028 and 2029 and will replace Léon Thévenin (built in 1983) and Antonio Meucci (built in 1987).
The order was part of Orange Marine’s fleet modernisation strategy, with CEO Michaël Trabbia calling it a “strategic investment to ensure the resilience and security of the global internet.”
Finally, belatedly, at last, GMG has followed suit and boldly ordered (drum roll)... one new cable laying and repair vessel.
Yes, just one new ship, also to be built at the same Sri Lankan yard with scheduled delivery in the final few months of 2029 after the Orange Marine ships are delivered.
To read the GMG press release, one would have assumed slightly more. The one Vard-designed newbuild, “alongside the recent acquisition of CS Clipper, represents a significant renewal of our operational fleet," the company said. "It strengthens our ability to support long-term maintenance contracts with the world’s leading cable owners, while positioning us to capitalise on the growing demand in the subsea cable market."
Honestly, I don’t see this. So, by the time the newbuild is in service, GMG will have missed the surging demand predicted by its new owner between now and 2029, and in 2030, it will have a fleet of six ships with an average age of over 30 years, plus the one newbuild.
That’s not to say that the GMG newbuild is not technically advanced and necessary; it is just that one new ship being delivered more than three years from now does nothing to solve GMG’s strategic positioning.
In 2021, we condemned GMG’s charter of the Normand Clipper and Normand Cutter as “Too little, too late.” That remains the case today.
There is a pressing need for fleet renewal in data cable laying and repair. There is an open commercial goal. Despite having a new owner with deep pockets and a reputation for having a strong long-term vision, GMG is still not making the investments that it needs to survive and that all of us, as users of the internet, need it to make.
If GMG and KIF won’t or can’t place the newbuild orders, Orange Marine SubCom, Alcatel Submarine Networks, Optic Marine Services or IT International Telecom Marine, could you please step up to the plate? Thanks.
We were intrigued to see that Bahri, Saudi Arabia’s national shipping line had ordered two offshore support vessels (OSVs) to work in Ras Tanura, from Grandweld, the UAE shipbuilder. Bahri is a potent force in ocean shipping with a fleet of 39 very large crude carriers, 28 chemical tankers, ten product tankers and nine bulkers. So newbuild OSVs from a player of this size would be a major development.
The ships sounded intriguing, and we searched in vain for details. Then we noticed on the sign behind the gentlemen joyfully signing the newbuild contract that they are simply 25-metre-long crewboats….
Please call a crew boat a crew boat in future.
I was expecting Bahri perhaps to be called upon to bail out Rawabi Holdings, the Saudi Arabian owner of some two hundred OSVs and a company that has faced some serious issues in recent years.
But last night, August 2, Rawabi announced that it has secured US$1.9 billion in new loans that would be used to, “streamline its finances.”
Previously, Rawabi Holding Company raised US$595 million to fund a major part of its OSV newbuild program for its Rawabi Vallianz Offshore Services subsidiary, a comprising more than 25 vessels in February. That transaction was funded by Maas Capital and Australis Maritime, two leading alternative asset managers focused on shipping and maritime assets, and Alantra acted as financial adviser.
I hope the new cash is used to pay the company’s staff and seafarers on time, and to sort out the thirty or so vessels that are reported to be laid up, and which apparently cannot be operated due to cash flow constraints.
Background reading
More on the history of GMG is here.