Maersk Broker is to sharpen its focus on complex offshore advisory services after branching out into the subsea arena and expanding its dedicated offshore team this week.
As TradeWinds reported online, the Danish shipbroker is taking full ownership of Kennedy Marr, putting to rest weeks of speculation about its purchase of the UK subsea specialist brokerage.
Maersk Broker has not disclosed the value of the deal but global head of offshore Finn Essendrop says the move can be viewed as a clear countercyclical expansion during the sector’s worst downturn in 30 years.
However, he stresses that his company would have moved towards the purchase regardless of the deep crisis in the sector, as offshore is a target for growth.
Interesting partner
“There are many supporting reasons for doing this deal, and one is the countercyclical point. But we had already identified Kennedy Marr as an interesting partner when the market was up. That is because we believe in the subsea sector,” Essendrop said.
A key part of the strategy is to build on traditional broker tasks, such as vessel chartering and sale-and-purchase (S&P), by making a concerted push into complex advisory work in offshore.
“We want to develop our business away from what you might think of as the ‘fix and forget’ type of brokerage, to a more advisory service,” Essendrop said.
“The whole development in the offshore industry, where it is becoming more complicated and challenging, is something that we believe we are up to taking on. We want to meet that challenge and we believe the skill set in Kennedy Marr matches this goal.”
As an independent company that must compete for business from AP Moller-Maersk entities, Maersk Broker’s push into offshore trails the wider group’s operations in the sector by many decades.
Maersk Supply Service (MSS), which has traditionally been a key owner of the largest anchor handlers, has been in the offshore sector for the past 50 years, and Maersk Oil for at least 40. Maersk Broker, founded in 1914, has 17 offices in 15 countries with about 250 brokers but its dedicated offshore desk was only launched in 2011.
Maersk Broker has a team of 10 brokers dedicated to offshore. Following the deal, 11 new staff members will join the desk, eight of whom are brokers. Among them is Kennedy Marr managing director Mark Pasha.
Essendrop, 55, joined Maersk Broker in 2005, starting on the containership desk, but his offshore roots run deep, as he spent nearly 25 years working on the commercial side of MSS.
In 2009, he was asked to head Maersk Broker’s specialised tonnage division, which included offshore at that time, and he slowly began to hire staff with offshore experience.
At that time, there were occasional efforts in offshore, he says, but Maersk Broker had a long-standing, exclusive relationship with AP Moller-Maersk for its offshore assets.
But in the wake of its offshore desk being launched in 2011, Maersk Broker embarked on an expansion plan in 2014.
“We decided to expand this offshore business because we believe we can develop it into a strong, independent leg alongside our other independent businesses,” Essendrop said.
“When we started out with a focused strategy on offshore, we were very clear that we had to crawl before we could walk, and we had to walk before we could run. So we said, ‘Let us focus on one thing and become good at that’.”
Essendrop says 2016 was the best year to date for the offshore team, with about 30 S&P deals done.
The next step, via Kennedy Marr, is subsea. Essendrop says there are good arguments for an early uptick in the subsea sector, such as in inspection, maintenance and repair (IMR).
“Right now, oil companies probably want to be a little bit cautious and invest where they will have a quicker return. I think the IMR side is actually one of those areas, but we will also see certain subsea developments with tie-backs to existing production,” he said.
“We definitely believe in subsea, but one month is not going to change it to a strong market. It will come slowly, but we definitely already now see some signs [of recovery].”
