![COLUMN | How will the Seacor Marine saga end? [Offshore Accounts]](http://media.assettype.com/bairdmaritime%2F2026-07-20%2F74sd20ob%2FUntitled-November-24-2025-at-09.11.06.jpeg?w=480&auto=format%2Ccompress&fit=max)
With the FIFA World Cup reaching its climax yesterday in a triumph for Spain over Argentina after extra time, it’s time to think about how the other big game in play will conclude. Not the sale of Vroon’s standby fleet, not the Norwegian lawsuits by billionaire Christen Sveaas’ Kistefos over the refinancing of Solstad Offshore, nor even the next round of Bourbon online auctions.
The next offshore drama to kick off will be between the board of Seacor potential buyers. Who will buy Seacor, will there be red cards or penalties, and will anyone eventually lift the trophy?
Last month, two of Seacor Marine Holding’s largest shareholders wrote letters to the board demanding that the company close the gap between the actual value of its fleet and its share price… by selling the company.
Both Jorey Chernett, founder of Pointillist Family Office, and Yoav Saffar, the founder and CIO of Smartlenses Capital, feel that the gap between the value of the company as a whole as reflected in its stock price, and the individual values of the 17 platform supply vessels (PSVs), 21 DP2 fast supply crewboats and five liftboats in the company’s fleet, if they were sold separately, is simply too great.
The Seacor fleet is very young. The average age of the company’s vessels at the end of 2025 was 10.4 years, whereas for Tidewater, its average fleet age was 13.6 years.
The company also has two newbuild battery hybrid PSVs of 4,650 DWT and 1,000 square metres clear deck space under construction in China, as per the last investor update. These two newbuilds are partly paid for already, with 60 per cent already paid to the yard in milestone payments. They are included in the vessel count of 17 PSVs.
Upon delivery of these Breeze-designed PSVs in October 2026 and January 2027, there is a 40 per cent balance payment due from Seacor on the total newbuilding cost of US$41 million apiece. The sale of non-core AHTSs funded the first milestone payment for the newbuilds in the first quarter of last year (the former Norman F. McCall is now Red Tiger under Repasa ownership working in Equatorial Guinea).
The company has arranged a new senior secured term loan, which is available to fund up to half of the total contract price. Only US$16.4 million was drawn down as of December 31, 2025. So, the buyers should have at least half the final payments covered by that loan.
Despite the gnashing of teeth from the shareholders, it is not as if Seacor had not already been proactive in selling ships and buying back its shares. The sale of the company’s last anchor handlers last year was only the start of a wider programme of disposals and buybacks to placate the shareholders and deliver cash to them. In 2025, the company also sold two 335-foot (102-metre) liftboats and one stacked 245-foot (74.7-metre) liftboat, plus three PSVs larger than 2,000 DWT, and one crewboat.
The seven vessels sold had an average age of 13.8 years, which is pretty much the average for the global offshore supply fleet. The company raised total proceeds of approximately US$130 million, but more importantly, it also made a US$63.4 million gain on the sales, being the difference between the price achieved by the sales and the value of the vessels on the company’s books.
Also in 2025, the company completed a securities repurchase from the Carlyle Group, representing 9.1 per cent of the outstanding shares of common stock in the company for an aggregate purchase price of around US$12.9 million, or US$4.90 per share, a price far below the company’s share price last week.
It is notable that whereas Tidewater has purchased its shares at prices far above its current stock price of US$76, Seacor has bought its shares back at lower prices, representing a much better use of company funds.
However, the company still made a net loss of US$27.8 million in 2025, as well as a loss of US$46 million in 2024 (a figure that excludes a non-cash loss of US$32 million on the early extinguishment of debt).
One particular gripe of the shareholders is that Seacor has a high corporate overhead, spending US$47 million on administration and general expenses in 2025, over US$1 million per vessel.
Tidewater spent US$134.5 million on general and administrative expenses last year across its fleet of 213 vessels, being US$630,000 per vessel, a third less than Seacor did. Selling assets only makes it harder to cover the company’s overhead, however, and creates dis-economies as more head office and admin costs have to be spread over fewer vessels as Seacor shrinks.
On Friday, Seacor’s market capitalisation was US$214 million, plus another approximately US$297 million of long-term debt as per the most recent quarterly report, which gives an enterprise value of around US$500 million. Unfortunately for the management, the shareholders of Seacor reckon the company could be worth up to US$1 billion if it were sold, as they said in their letters to the board of the company.
Mr Chernett declared that, “enough is enough,” and that the board should move to sell the liftboats, and then the rest of the fleet in a structured process. We understand that this structured process has now kicked off.
The situation has improved significantly over the last year. A year ago, Seacor traded at US$5.52 per share, and it now trades at US$7.91, helped by the speculation that the shareholders will encourage a takeover of the company.
Unfortunately, that 44 per cent increase in the Seacor stock price pales compared to the 55 per cent rise in Tidewater’s share price over the same period, let alone the 98 per cent increase in the share price of deepwater rig owner Transocean.
So, we have a company that has a large overhead, a shrinking fleet, and one that has been consistently loss making. A sale sounds logical, but it will be tough to reach the values the shareholders desire.
Selling large fleets of vessels is always harder than it seems because, strangely, there is a fleet discount applicable to transactions involving whole companies, typically of around 20 per cent of the individual vessel values.
Some of this discount simply boils down to the fact that there are far fewer buyers with pockets deep enough to pay, say, US$300 million for the shares and take on another US$300 million of debt.
There are dozens, if not a hundred companies, in the offshore supply space that could buy one or two vessels from Seacor’s fleet. We have seen this in the ongoing ICBC Chinese bank auctions of the Bourbon fleet, where the buyers have ranged from the large and the well-known, like Astro Offshore and Britoil, to much more exotic and obscure buyers from Indonesia, Trinidad, China and Switzerland.
The lack of a large pool of buyers means that fleet sales typically result in a discount. This was a major stumbling block in the sale of the UOS-managed fleet of 11 anchor handlers by the private equity company Hayfin, which finally went through earlier this month after years of trying. There simply weren’t enough credible buyers willing to pay the sale price demanded by the sellers.
Secondly, there is the problem of liabilities. Seacor Marine has been in the offshore business since 1989 when its co-founder, New York lawyer Charles Fabrikant, acquired the fleet of NICOR in the Gulf of Mexico. It then expanded by acquiring the fleets of Smit Lloyd and Ferronia International Shipping in the 1990s, and then Seabulk and Stirling Shipping in the 2000s. Over those four decades, the company will inevitably have picked up ongoing liabilities, unresolved disputes and pending lawsuits, which buyers will be wary of taking on.
Buying a ship means you buy it clean without its past legal suits, which remain the problem of the previous owner under the Norwegian Sale Form or under an admiralty auction. Buy a whole company, however, and you take on all its issues and challenges, all the skeletons in the closet, from pension funding requirements and tax claims to long-term leases, environmental remediation cases, dissatisfied foreign partners and goodness knows what else.
Sometimes there is upside for the buyer, if a legal case can be settled for less than anticipated, for example, but often there is uncertainty and risk. Potential buyers will inevitably assume the worst (often rightly) and this depresses corporate sale prices.
Finally, there is the problem of Seacor being an American company. Since it owns and manages ships working in the US Gulf of Mexico, the Jones Act means it can only be bought by another American company, of which there are few.
Hornbeck is merging with Helix. Harvey Gulf is trying to sell ten of its own PSVs, unsuccessfully, it seems, from their endless circulation by brokers. Otto Candies and the other smaller players are probably just that – too small. There could be private equity interest or there could be a bid from a listed US shipping company outside offshore.
But there are probably just two potential industry buyers: Edison Chouest and Tidewater.
Chouest is a company that has always grown organically and whose private ownership means its accounts are completely opaque and unknown. I may as well speculate on the prospects of the results of a dog show as opine on the prospects of Edison Chouest buying Seacor. But Chouest is not known for its past history of corporate acquisitions, unlike Tidewater.
For Tidewater there is a clear fit, especially if Seacor was able to sell off its remaining liftboats, which would leave only a fleet of DP PSVs and crewbboats working mainly in Africa and the Middle East, two core areas for Tidewater.
Tidewater has a track record as the industry Pac-Man gobbling up its competitors, taking over Gulfmark, Swire Pacific Offshore, 37 PSVs from Solstad and, this year, the PSV fleet of Wilson Sons UltraTug for around US$500 million total cost including debt. The Wilson Sons deal received regulatory approval on June 30th as per Tidewater’s most recent filing.
Buying Seacor would deliver newer vessels to Tidewater’s ageing fleet and would provide it with its first new builds.
The main attraction for Tidewater, though, might be that buying Seacor could solve Tidewater’s longstanding succession problem for its energetic but seasoned CEO, Quintin Kneen. Mr Kneen is a ruthless industry legend. Part of his ruthlessness has been ensuring that there is no obvious internal successor in Tidewater.
As a result, Tidewater’s talent pipeline has been a little meagre. It promoted several of the Swire Pacific Offshore managers from its 2022 acquisition to senior roles as managing directors, and recently, it poached the head of offshore from the brokerage Clarkson in London. As a Jones Act company, Tidewater can only be run by an American, however.
Buying Seacor lock, stock and barrel would provide Tidewater with access to Seacor’s leadership. Could we speculate that Seacor’s John Gellert might be the perfect successor to Mr Kneen, and that buying Seacor might be the best way for Tidewater to buy some younger talent as well as some younger ships?
We keep hearing that people are a company’s most important assets. Usually that is cant, but in a hypothetical Seacor-Tidewater union, there could be some truth in it. Offering Mr Gellert the top job could also help remove opposition from Seacor’s management regarding the sale.
Let’s see whether Seacor’s sale goes into extra time like the Argentina/Spain game last night. It could get messy…
Note that we are not giving investment advice here, we have no inside knowledge of what may transpire to Seacor, and we have not spoken to the leadership of either company in the preparation of this piece.
Summer shorts tips
The holidays are here, and what offshore- or maritime-related books, films, and podcasts can you recommend? I am hoping to run my annual “Summer shorts” column on relaxing material to read, view, or listen to whilst you lounge beside the pool or at the beach, so please send your top tips to hieronymousbosch.baird@gmail.com (note the spelling carefully).
