DNV GL bullish on deepwater development in Asia-PacificDNV GL bullish on deepwater development in Asia-Pacific

“Singapore is getting more and more important we see a lot of deepwater developments particularly on gas,” Remi Eriksen, executive vice president and coo of DNV GL, told Seatrade Global.

In the region deepwater developments off Australia, developments are being seen in Indonesia and will start soon in Malaysia he noted.

“The fact we established our deepwater technology centre here in Singapore three years ago it was a good idea,” Eriksen said. From Singapore the classification society is able to serve the market in Australia, Indonesia and Malaysia. Eriksen added that this did not mean they did not have people locally in these markets, however, they had strong centre of competency based in Singapore.

In addition to its new regional headquarters building in Singapore DNV GL is opening a new laboratory this weekend located in Jurong. The laboratory is three times the size of the existing facility they had in Singapore. “They will be able to qualify new technology. When things fail we can go back and do failure investigation,” he explained.

DNV GL has seen enormous growth in Asia over the last decade increasing from just 400 staff in 2004 to 4,000 today. “So we have multiplied by 10 times in 10 years. So that’s significant growth,” Eriksen commented.

With the classification market getting increasingly competitive he believes the scale and scope of DNV GL will give it the edge over its competitors.

“There will always be price pressure, [Class] NK is moving strongly out of Japan and they are providing attractive prices. But at the same time they don’t have same footprint as DNV GL, so I think they will have some challenges delivering the high quality and consistent services around the world,” he said.

The combination of DNV’s offshore expertise and GL’s specialism in containerships is something the class society sees as particularly attractive to major shipyards. “The yards see now they have one classification society that is both strong on offshore and containers and the Korean yards they see that this is the future. I think we are able to serve them,” Eriksen said.

DNV GL’s new Asia Pacific headquarters will house around 500 staff, taking over from DNV’s old regional building in Singapore where was based for the past 30 years.