Oceaneering International Sees Rise in Profit Amidst Declining Oil Sales

Oilfield service company Oceaneering International is one of the few oil companies that have been able to escape this year’s weak earnings plaguing the oil industry.  The company has posted higher than expected results for this season.

Last summer when oil plummeted from $150 a barrel to $33 a barrel, large oil companies began looking further down the road to more profitable future investments. Mostly notably are offshore developments where projects take up to 10 years to bring into full operation.

“The deepwater infrastructure market is one of the few secular growth markets in the oilfields service space,” says Douglas Becker, oil services and equipment senior analyst at SMH Capital. “Each one will be drilling three, four, maybe five wells … that will drive increasing demand for deepwater infrastructure.”

“We continue to believe that we are in one of the sweet spots of the industry,” Oceaneering Chief Executive T. Jay Collins announced Thursday.

Oceaneering provides drilling services to deepwater oil investors by utilising a fleet of remotely operated vehicles.  Between 2009 and 2010 19 new drilling rigs are scheduled to be put into service, of the 19 Oceaneering retains the contracts for 16 of them.

Oceaneering also recently announced a new contract estimated to be worth between $44 million to $64 million from Petrobras Netherlands, a deepwater oil drilling firm with projects off the coast of oil rich Brazil.

Special thanks to forbes.com for the above quotes, for more information please view the article on their website