![COLUMN | The Twelve Days of Christmas 2025: Twelve Bourbon vessels a-selling; eleven per cent profit rise at Subsea 7; ten years of waiting for a Scottish ferry … and a partridge in a pear tree [Offshore Accounts]](http://media.assettype.com/bairdmaritime%2F2025-12-28%2F9kzqvgl0%2FUntitled.jpeg?w=480&auto=format%2Ccompress&fit=max)
Merry Christmas. On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me… a partridge in a pear tree, according to the ancient English carol, but at Baird Maritime, we ditch the twelve drummers drumming, eleven pipers piping, and ten lords a-leaping, and instead, we run a dozen festive features on the offshore industry in the run up to Epiphany.
Last year, we had twelve newbuilds-a-building, eleven million dollars of rigs a-selling, ten per cent a wind-powering. This year, we open with a festive favourite. Not ten lords a leaping, but ten years a-waiting for a Scottish ferry!
The fiasco of Clydebank shipbuilder Ferguson Marine’s efforts to build a pair of ferries for state-owned Calmac for service to the Scottish island of Arran just goes on and on. Observing the monumental problems with the project is now a festive tradition here at Baird Maritime. Who needs Secret Santa when you can have an annual ferry fiasco feature?
In 2023 we opened our Twelve Days of Christmas feature with the observation that, “three wise men, or indeed anyone with an ounce of common sense of any gender, appear to have been sorely absent from Scottish shipbuilder Ferguson Marine and its owner the Scottish Government,” after David Tydeman, the then-boss of the nearly bankrupt shipyard, was gifted a fat, annual bonus amid outcry at further delays and massive cost overruns on the ferries. Mr Tydeman was out of his job shortly thereafter.
Last year, we celebrated the first day of Christmas with the fact that, finally, Glen Sannox, the first of the two ferries, was successfully delivered, more than nine years after it was ordered, and six and a half years after the original delivery date. At the time, flush with foolish naivete, we remarked that, “the second vessel Glen Rosa [is] due to be delivered at some point in 2025, allegedly September.”
Given that Glen Rosa was originally ordered in 2015, that didn’t seem a stretch target, but… Surprise! The ferry will not be delivered in 2025.
The second ferry is now delayed further until the fourth quarter of 2026, making a total of eight years of delays on the original delivery date of 2018 when the ferry was ordered, ten years ago, in 2015.
Of course, there is also another US$40 million of cost increases associated with the deferral, bringing the total cost of the two ferries inexorably closer to half a billion pounds (US$669 million).
The cause of the new delay is actually due to the fact that Glen Rosa has already been so delayed. In a shipyard, delay costs and delay times compound, creating further delay costs and further delay times. A bad situation gets inevitably worse.
When the vessel drydocked in August 2025, inspections revealed corrosion in the stern tubes and deterioration of the hull coating. Time and tide wait for no man, and marine coating systems and steel do not stand still in the face of saltwater and degradation over what would normally be a five-year survey cycle. So, more work and more time and more cost are required to remedy the situation, bringing the undelivered vessel through some of the scope of an unwanted special survey.
So, the ship will need a lengthy second drydocking, and Ferguson said that the earliest available slot is not until later in 2026. I find this really hard to believe (we are talking about Northern Europe here, not West Africa or the Pacific Coast of Latin America), but The Northern Scot newspaper highlights one convenience that this new delay affords:
“The delay means Glen Rosa will not be in service ahead of the election in May, after First Minister John Swinney told STV News it would be last summer.”
Hmm... The biggest challenge for Ferguson is what happens when the final ferry is delivered. The orderbook of Glen Sannox and Glen Rosa has sustained jobs at Ferguson on the Clyde for a decade, including five different chief executives. When Glen Rosa is delivered (in 2026?), the yard will have to confront a hard truth that its orderbook is empty and the workforce is at risk.
This is a situation that would be politically inconvenient for the Scottish Government during an election. The fate of the yard is a political time bomb, unless follow-on work can be found.
Ferguson CEO Graeme Thomson, the latest in the revolving door of leaders at the yard, joined his predecessors in apologising for the new delay, but he did not rule out that there might be further delays in delivery into 2027 in a Scottish television interview, which one Baird reader described as “Jibber-Jabber”.
“While these setbacks have confirmed historic systemic issues within our operations, they do not define our future,” Mr Thomson said, “We are embarking on an ambitious modernisation journey that will transform Ferguson Marine whilst we work extremely hard to deliver a Clyde-built vessel that showcases our commitment to the highest standards of safety and quality.”
Please. The greatest Christmas gift Mr Thomson could give to the people of Scotland would be the delivery of Glen Rosa. Enough is enough. New orders and deliveries are what we need, not complacency. End the Scottish Ferry Fiasco by delivering Glen Rosa.
Shares in Norwegian subsea contractor Subsea 7 stand just a shade below their all-time high after more than 20 years listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange. If you invested in the company five years ago, well done; you have more than doubled your money and Subsea 7 now has a market capitalisation of over US$6 billion.
However, debt at the end of September was miniscule – it stood just a shade over US$500 million, and this included lease liabilities of US$421 million on long term chartered in vessels. The company has 12 chartered-in ships, including Solstad’s Normand Subsea, DOF’s Skandi Connector and Skandi Acergy, Boskalis’ BOKA SubC, Golden Energy Offshore’s Energy Sphynx and Otto Candies’ Grant Candies and Ross Candies and the subsea vessel Siem Stingray.
There would seem to be a conscious decision to share the love and not be dependent on any one vessel owner for chartered-in tonnage.
Subsea 7 is an increasingly, and now consistently, profitable business, with a strong orderbook and strong cashflow generation, as well as low debt. Two of its major competitors, Vantris Energy (former Sapura) and McDermott International, have struggled with protracted restructurings, leaving only TechnipFMC as a credible rival in deepwater installation for the billion US dollar-plus projects for new floating production installations.
The scale, scope and success of Subsea 7 is something to celebrate – last month, the company posted an eleven per cent year-on-year increase in its third quarter net profit, which rose to US$109 million, as it progresses its merger with Italy’s Saipem to further concentrate its market share in complex, high-value offshore construction and installation projects. Profits from oil and gas were ten times larger than profits from offshore wind in the quarter, even as 2025 was a good year for wind installation in Taiwan and the North Sea.
Subsea 7 operated 13 construction and horizontal flexlay vessels and five rigid pipelay units, as well as seven renewables vessels, six inspection repair and maintenance vessels (all of which are chartered in), six transportation and heavy-lift ships, and four dive support vessels, to give it a total fleet of 41 vessels at the end of September, 29 of which it owns. The company bills US$20 million a day, generated US$236 million of quarterly free cash flow, and has a US$13.9 billion backlog of offshore contracts.
Both TechnipFMC and Subsea7 published almost identical slides of their bidding targets in their investor presentations (here and here). Subsea7 gives a selection of tenders on which the company says it is already working in-house or that are expected in the next 12 months, ranked by contract size.
It is worth looking at where these two powerhouses foresee future deepwater developments in their bidding pipeline.
What they are bidding today will be the development drilling projects of 2027 and 2028, and the construction projects of 2029 and 2030. This excludes projects already awarded for future execution, like the ENI floating LNG project for Coral North in Mozambique, which was awarded to TechnipFMC just before Christmas.
These maps clearly show that the two biggest offshore deepwater hotspots are going to be Brazil and West Africa, which account for eight out of the nine projects valued at over US$750 million to Subsea7. Subsea7 lists four projects in Brazil and four in West Africa, spread across Ghana, Ivory Coast, Namibia and Nigeria.
The ninth is Equinor’s Bay du Nord floating production project in Canada, 500 kilometres northeast of St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, which was discovered in 2013 and is still awaiting sanction.
TechnipFMC’s pipeline is given for the next 24 months, and adds in a couple more projects that the company foresees will be worth US$1 billion or more, being Woodside’s Browse project in Australia, one Cairn India project, two Norwegian tenders and ExxonMobil’s Longtail development in Guyana. In Asia, Indonesia dominates deepwater with four projects listed by TechnipFMC, and one in Brunei, Petronas Carilgali’s Kelidang cluster development in over 2,500 metres of water.
But again, the biggest regions remain Brazil and West Africa. Those eleven pipers a-piping will increasingly have an Atlantic Basin tune.
Last week, for the ninth day of Christmas, we looked at the sale of Bourbon Gomen, an 80-ton bollard pull DP2, diesel-electric anchor handling tug supply vessel, which was bought by Britoil for US$9.56 million as part of the protracted auction of the three dozen or so offshore vessels owned by the Chinese leasing house ICBC on which French supply boat operator Bourbon defaulted in 2019.
Just before Christmas, ICBC announced a further wave of eight vessels to be sold from today onwards, through to the first week of February, plus an additional four vessels that have been circulated to brokers for “pre-sale” announcement, meaning that they will be auctioned later in the year, being three anchor handlers and a PSV, all working in West Africa and all built in 2013 or 2014.
You can track the auction on the Shipbid.net website; all details are given here in good faith without guarantee.
So, there will be twelve vessels a-selling, core vessels in the Bourbon fleet, and you can bet, that like in the case of Bourbon Calm, a similar PX105 design PSV as Bourbon Clear and Bourbon Front, the company will be seeking to buy back the best of its assets in the auction. And it now has the financial firepower to do so.
On December 22, Bourbon announced the completion of its financial and capital restructuring, which has been ongoing since 2019, with control of the company being handed to two American private equity funds, Davidson Kempner and the Fortress Investment Group. The company said that the shared objective of the new shareholders, “is to improve the group’s profitability, capture market growth and reposition Bourbon as a best-in-class offshore energy services provider.”
So, reversing the sale of core vessels in its fleet becomes a first step in the rebuilding of the company. As part of the restructuring, Bourbon has cleaned up its balance sheet through the conversion of a significant portion of its debt into equity, and the new shareholders have injected fresh capital, new money, which we bet will be used to buy the best vessels in the ICBC auction.
Bourbon says that its strengthened financial position, “provides the group with renewed flexibility to invest in its fleet (including the reactivation of offshore support vessels, life-extension programmes and the renewal of its crewboat fleet).”
It has already announced the delivery of six newbuild Piriou fast crewboats for service in West Africa and upgrades to the PSV Bourbon Calm against a five-year charter for chemical carriage in Guyana with ExxonMobil, as well as four new crewboats in 2024.
In September, Bourbon announced it had won a charter for new 34-metre vessels to transfer personnel between Soyo and Block 15, located eighty miles offshore for ExxonMobil in Angola. The company also claimed success in July when it won a five-year contract with Eni Congo for the renewal of its crewboat fleet through the charter of six new vessels, scheduled to be commissioned progressively between June and December 2026.
All these wins were signs that Bourbon is back, baby. The company has lost market share in the crewboat market to All Energies and their novel 50-knot Aircat surface effect vessels with TotalEnergies in Angola, and to Peschaud and Promar. We can now expect a much more vigorous response from Marseille, as Bourbon seeks to rebuild lost share in the crewboat business from which the company's offshore empire was originally born.
Following the new shareholders structure, a general assembly meeting held on December 19, 2025, (re)appointed Gaël Bodénès as Chief Executive Officer. He has said he will lead this new phase of the group’s transformation plan until mid-2026, within a structured and well-managed transition framework until his departure from the group.
It was rumoured that a former CEO of Perenco might replace Mr Bodénès, but this seems not to have been concluded yet.
The shareholders also appointed a new board dominated by directors from Davidson Kempner and Fortress, and one from Triton, the third fund participating as a shareholder in Bourbon.
Following the unfortunate bribery conviction against Mr Bodénès in 2024 (which he is appealing), it came as a surprise to us that the new shareholders appointed Bruno Chabas, the former CEO of SBM Offshore, as Chairman of the Board of Bourbon. In 2016, SBM Offshore had disclosed that Mr Chabas had decided to accept the Brazilian Public Prosecutor’s proposal for an out-of-court settlement, on a "no admission of guilt" basis, of the allegations made against him in relation to bribery and corruption. It seems he paid around US$60,000 to settle the case.
It’s Christmas time, after all. The words of another carol come to mind, those of Hark the Harald Angels Sing: “Peace on earth and mercy mild, God and sinners reconciled!”
Bourbon also has a new executive committee appointed by the new board, and as 2025 draws to a close we congratulate François Sordet (Chief Financial Officer), Stephan Midenet (Chief Operating Officer), Lucia Checcaglini (Chief Supply Chain Officer), Karim Mebarek (Chief Commercial Officer), Jean-Christophe Laran (Chief Human Resources Officer), and Rodolphe Bouchet (Chief Transformation Officer) on joining this august body.
The conclusion of this restructuring has taken over six years, following the judgment dated December 23, 2019 by the Marseilles Commercial Court to confirm the disposal of the assets of Bourbon Corporation to Société Phocéenne de Participations, a company owned by the following banking institutions : BNP Paribas, Caisse Régionale de Crédit Agricole Mutuel Alpes Provence, Caisse Régionale de Crédit Agricole Mutuel de Paris et d'Ile de France, CM-CIC Investissement SCR, Crédit Lyonnais, Natixis and Société Générale.
Now the banks are gone as shareholders, private equity holds control, and Bourbon must succeed in saving its fleet from dismemberment in the next phase of the ICBC auctions.
Will twelve drummers drumming be drumming in the return of twelve vessels to the full control of Bourbon from ICBC? Or will Britoil or Tan Cang or Glory Shipmanagement – all winners in past bids – triumph?
We’ll keep you posted.
Background Reading
Following on from last week’s coverage of the suspicious drone activities in Northern Europe, Denmark’s Danwatch has published reports from Danish pilot Bjarne Cæsar Skinnerup on the frequent sightings by him and his colleagues of what appear to be Russian military onboard "dark fleet" vessels transiting to and from the Baltic Sea. Who they are is not clear, part of the Russian military’s longstanding policy of maskirovka, deception to create tactical uncertainty.
You can read Jakob Kjøgx Bohr’s first-class coverage of the situation on the tankers, which is not dissimilar to the appearance of “Little Green Men” in Crimea and the Donbas in 2014, armed men who came at night in balaclavas, with no insignia, who were later revealed as Russian Spetsnaz special forces, a fact that was denied by the Russian Government at the time. Mr Bohr’s coverage is here:
Military Uniforms and Total Secrecy: Eyewitness Raises Alarm about Russian Oil Tankers
Former Spetsnaz Leader Suddenly Appeared on Dark Fleet Ship in Øresund
Norwegian diver Paal Stefan Dinessen has produced an epic history of Subsea 7 and the entire offshore diving industry, which you can see on his The Norwegian website here. His timeline is an epic piece of research that extends the company history on Subsea 7’s own website. Who knew that Saipem was an acronym for Società Azionaria Italiana Perforazioni E Montaggi – The Drilling and Assembly Italian Public Limited Company, founded in 1957?
