Page 36: of Maritime Reporter Magazine (June 2022)

INTERVIEW PIETER VAN OORD, CEO,VAN OORD actually larger than the order book for our dredging business.

Pieter, to start, can you give a ‘By the Numbers’

The largest project in our order book, for offshore wind, is look at your company today using the metrics the So? a project for RWE, which is a project built in the UK. of your choice?

Well, 2021 was a disappointing year for us. As we said in It’s a massive 1.4 GW project, where we have the balance of our annual report, it was ‘a year with two faces.’ We had to planned for the foundations and the cables. That is the largest project in the order book.

report a loss for the ? rst time in a long time in our company; a

If you ask me the projects we are tendering, I would say loss which was created by large provisions we had to take on three projects, including two offshore wind projects. One is maybe 20 at this moment.

We are tendering now for projects in offshore wind projects the Greater Changhua project in Taiwan for Ørsted. The other in ‘24, ‘25, ‘26, ‘27, ‘28, even sometimes 2029. What we see one is the Saint-Brieuc project in France for Iberdrola. I’ll ex- is long lead times between tenders and the actual execution of plain in detail a little bit later.

On the other side of the coin, we ? nished 2021 with a 4.4 the project. That is typical in offshore wind.

Usually, I would say you win a project in year one, and you billion Euro orderbook, which is a record orderbook for our execute a project in year three or year four. So, the work we’re company.

tendering for, most of it now is ‘25, ‘26. We have a pretty good

So (today there is some) optimism about this coming de- cades. We clearly see that the tipping point in our industry order book for ‘22, ‘23, ‘24 already. We’re tendering for only happened somewhere in 2021. Clients are aware that there is a few projects left in ‘24.

We recently announced that we are the preferred contrac- going to be a shortage of vessels, there’s going to be a short- tor on three large projects in Japan, which is a major step, for age of experienced contractors.

Obviously, Van Oord serves several sectors.

Can you give a brief breakdown of revenue by market sector, with speci? c insights on the cu- mulative contribution and the future growth that you see in offshore wind, as a whole?

In 2020 we had a turnover of 630 million Euro for offshore wind, and with that the offshore wind business was, for the ? rst time in the history of the company, the largest activity in our company, larger than dredging.

We saw a downturn in wind ? gures to 350 million Euros in ‘21. But I dare to say that this was an incidental event, associ- ated with the operational issues we had on two projects.

So what we see in ‘21 was that dredging was more than 700 million (Euros), offshore wind 350 million (Euros), traditional offshore oil and gas, 200 million (Euros), and our infrastructure business in the Netherlands was about 250 million (Euros).

If you look at the future, it is obvious that our (offshore) wind business will outpace all other businesses. So, we’re convinced that within wind, we’re going to see double digits growth ? gures in the entire industry.

The question is, who is going to build all these projects?

Are there suf? cient contractors prepared to take on all of these risks? I don’t know the answer at the moment, but we are pre- dicting an unbalance between supply and demand during this decade.

How big is your offshore wind order book to- day? What is the largest projects in your pipe- line? And, can you share with me the projects that you’re tendering at the moment?

Our order book is about one and a half billion Euros, which is a record high order book for offshore wind. And by that, it’s 36 Maritime Reporter & Engineering News • June 2022

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