The major offshore shipbuilding specialists, whether Singaporean Sembcorp or Korea's Samsung have already mourned new contracts. The former has reduced its workforce from 20,000 to 850 employees in its construction sites, and the latter has revised downwards the possibilities of large contracts on production units normally to be decided in 2020.

As in 2014, the entire upstream exploration sector is expected to suffer in the first place. Seismic and drilling have never really resumed since 2014. The last delivery of a seismic vessel was in April 2017, with the Oruc Reis funded by the Turkish government, and no orders have been recorded since 2014. Ditto for drilling vessels. While there are still about fifteen of these drillships ordered before 2014 in the construction sites, only a handful had to be actually delivered.

Capacity

In drilling, overcapacity remains the norm and always prevents the resumption of orders. According to data from the American consultant Wood Mackenzie, the proportion of drillships in operation is only 56% on 117 vessels, 57% in semi-submersible platforms on 123 units, and 57% in jack-up platforms on 540 units.

If we look at the opposite downstream of the sector and in particular FPSO (floating production storage and offloading), the situation is quite different. Between 2014 and 2020, the fleet of these new FPSOs or from converted former tankers increased from 151 to 204 units. Brazilian offshore led the way with 20 new FPSOs introduced in six years, followed by Asia excluding China (+15), the North Sea (+9) and West Africa (+4).

Dix-eight FPSOs are still on order today, nine in conversion and nine new builds. Changes in the price of crude oil can slow down or delay investment decisions, the deep offshore embodied by these FPSOs is not yet on land.