A jack-up rig is a drilling apparatus used in a body of water with a depth of 100m or so. Semi-submersible drilling rigs and drill ships are employed in the deeper sea. Singaporean companies have distinguished themselves in supplying small-scale jack-up rigs, but things are changing nowadays.
According to industry sources, Jurong Shipyard of Sembcorp Marine has recently won two deep-sea drill ship contracts from Swiss shipper Transocean. Each of the contracts is known to be worth approximately US$540 million.
These days, Singaporean shipbuilders are striving to overtake Korean companies by obtaining more and more deep-sea drill ship deals. “Chinese companies are currently concentrating on small-scale jack-up rigs to take Singaporean firms’ market share and, in response, Singaporean players are knocking on the door of the deep-sea drill ship market,” said an industry insider, continuing, “They are even engaged in speculative shipbuilding, that is, building a ship with no shipper fixed, for shipbuilding records.” This implies that they are very eager to set foot in the market.
Korean shipbuilders are coping with the situation by means of large-scale jack-up rigs. For instance, Samsung Heavy Industries entered the large-scale jack-up rig market in June last year, when it won two contracts from Statoil of Norway for the rigs to be used in the North Sea. Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering (DSME) also obtained a US$530 million deal for one jack-up rig set, which is to be employed in the same region, from Maersk Drilling of Denmark in September 2013. This is the first jack-up rig contract in three decades for DSME. The company had won two contracts for small-scale rigs in the early 1980s.