Subsea Expo 2019 – Kirsty Whyte interview with Craig Reid, Commercial Director at ROVOP

What brings you to Subsea Expo this year?

We’re just here to support the event. We’re always keen to support the event and we’ve recently expanded as a company both geographically and fleet size over the last four or five months. So, we're keen to explain to our clients what’s been going on. There’s been a lot of press releases out and we’re keen to engage with the clients and talk through some of those changes.

Can you tell us about any products or services that you're going to be showcasing at the event?

Yeah, we've got we've got one of our shell and HDS here. We're a leading provider in subsea robotics this is one of the core assets in our fleet we've got 51 assets from small electric ROV’s up to heavy duty construction work class systems. We've also got a simulator here which is a fundamental part of our business, where we train a lot of our operators and our junior members of staff as they come up through the Graduate scheme or the modern apprentices.

At the moment we're seeing an increased confidence in industry, what sort of impact is that having for you and for ROVOP?

it's a funny one for us actually because we've kind of bucked the trend over the last 12 to 18 months. We had an aggressive strategic approach to grow the business both geographically and fleet as I touched on earlier and there's a couple of opportunities that came to pass that we were able to exploit both of those strategies, so we've actively done that. While we do see the market recovering, it’s still very tight at the minute. We're seeing more activity in offshore renewables which is a core part of our business as well. We’re diversified 50/50 between oil and gas and offshore renewables so we're seeing more of a spike in some of the offshore renewables and we are seeing the oil and gas industry recovering. The acquisitions that we've made and the growth that were going through at the minute is partly getting us ready to exploit the market as it does bounce back in 2019.