A downturn turned around
Singapore’s marine and offshore industry spent 2025 doing something the sector attempted for a decade and mostly failed at: converting a downturn-scarred rig-building base into a profitable offshore-renewables and production-vessel business. The evidence is now in the accounts. Seatrium, the national champion formed from the merger of Sembcorp Marine and Keppel Offshore & Marine, roughly doubled its net profit and carried a net order book of S$17.8bn into 2026. The wider transport-engineering cluster that houses the yards was the fastest-growing part of Singapore manufacturing in 2025, expanding 18.7%.
Singapore’s global position
Singapore does not build many bulk carriers or container ships — that volume long ago moved to China and South Korea. What it dominates is the high-value, high-complexity end: ship repair and upgrading, the conversion of tankers into floating production, storage and offloading vessels (FPSOs), the construction of drilling rigs and, increasingly, the fabrication of offshore-wind substations and foundations. On any given day a large share of the world’s FPSO conversions and a substantial slice of Asia’s ship-repair drydocking passes through Singapore yards.
The foundations are geography and integration. Singapore sits at the Malacca–Singapore Strait chokepoint through which a large fraction of global seaborne trade passes; it is the world’s largest bunkering port; and it couples yards to a deep supplier base, classification societies, a maritime finance and insurance cluster, and one of the busiest container ports on earth. A vessel can refuel, repair, reclass and re-store within a single call.
Seatrium: the anchor, and its numbers
Seatrium is the sector’s centre of gravity, and its FY2025 results are the clearest proof of the turnaround. Revenue reached S$11.5bn, up 24% from S$9.2bn in FY2024. Net profit doubled to S$323.6m from S$156.8m, a 106% increase, as gross margin widened to 7.4% from 3.1%. The board proposed a final dividend of 3.0 cents a share, double the prior year, and net leverage improved.
The order book is where the strategic story sits. Seatrium closed 2025 with a net order book of S$17.8bn spanning 24 projects that stretch to 2033 — roughly 40% of it in renewables and cleaner-energy work. The two named drivers are telling: Petrobras P-series FPSOs and TenneT’s 2-gigawatt HVDC offshore-wind grid connections. In short, the company is no longer betting on a recovery in speculative jack-up rig orders — the wager that nearly sank its predecessors after 2015 — but on firm, contracted work for national oil companies and European grid operators.
The yards, and the move to Tuas
Physically, the sector is consolidating onto one site. Seatrium’s operations are anchored by the giant Tuas yard in Singapore’s far west, a purpose-built facility that concentrates drydocks, quays and fabrication halls previously spread across older yards. Scale on a single site matters for the work now flowing in: FPSO conversions and offshore-wind substations are enormous fabrications that need long unobstructed quays, heavy-lift capacity and space to build modules in parallel. The Tuas consolidation is what lets Singapore compete on very large projects against lower-cost yards in China and South Korea — it trades labour cost for engineering complexity, quality and schedule reliability that oil majors and grid operators will pay a premium for. Within the manufacturing statistics, transport engineering was the fastest-growing cluster of 2025, up 18.7%, driven precisely by these higher project volumes.
The pivot: from oil rigs to FPSOs and offshore wind
The strategic pivot is the whole thesis of the modern Singapore yard. Between roughly 2015 and 2020 the collapse in oil prices left Singapore’s rig-builders with cancelled orders, idle jack-ups and heavy losses; the merger of Sembcorp Marine and Keppel O&M into Seatrium in 2023 was in large part a response to that trauma. The recovery has come not from rebuilding the rig order book but from two adjacent markets.
FPSOs are the first. As offshore oil development shifts to deep water off Brazil, Guyana and West Africa, demand has surged for converted and newbuild floating production vessels — exactly the complex, one-off, heavily engineered work Singapore does best. Offshore wind is the second. Europe’s build-out of far-from-shore wind farms requires massive HVDC converter platforms and substations; the TenneT 2GW programme in Seatrium’s book is among the largest such contracts globally. Together, FPSOs and renewables now make up the bulk of the order book. The verdict: Singapore has substantially de-risked its marine base by moving from speculative rig-building to contracted production and grid infrastructure. The risk that remains is concentration — a handful of very large, long-duration projects whose delays or cost overruns would bite hard.
Subsea, ship repair and underwater husbandry
Beneath the marquee projects sits a broad services layer. Ship repair remains a dependable, high-frequency business: vessels must drydock periodically for hull cleaning, coating, propeller and rudder work, engine overhaul and statutory surveys, and Singapore’s repair yards handle a steady stream of tankers, gas carriers and container ships. Increasingly this includes retrofits — scrubbers, ballast-water treatment systems, and preparation for alternative fuels such as methanol and ammonia. Alongside drydock work is a growing in-water segment: underwater ship-husbandry — diver and ROV-based hull cleaning, propeller polishing and inspection carried out while a vessel stays afloat — plus subsea inspection, repair and maintenance for offshore structures and pipelines. For a bunkering hub of Singapore’s size, keeping hulls clean and fuel-efficient without taking ships out of service is itself a meaningful market.
The supplier base
As with Jurong Island, the visible champions rest on a wide, largely home-grown supplier base — the part of the marine record most relevant to Singapore’s mid-sized firms. A single FPSO or large repair project mobilises hundreds of suppliers: marine valves and pumps (cargo, ballast, cooling and fuel-system, built and certified to classification-society approval); propellers, thrusters and deck machinery (propulsion components, winches, cranes and mooring equipment, and the workshops that recondition them); ship chandlery and provisions (stores, spares, safety equipment and consumables to vessels in port); and class-approved workshops whose repair, testing and calibration work is formally recognised by classification societies.
Class societies, bunkering and talent
Three enabling systems make the cluster credible. The classification societies — ABS, DNV, Lloyd’s Register and Bureau Veritas among them — maintain substantial presences in Singapore, setting and verifying the construction and safety standards vessels and offshore units must meet; a fabrication or repair is only worth what a recognised society will certify. The bunkering and port link keeps ships calling — as the world’s largest bunker hub, with a record 56.77 million tonnes sold in 2025 and rising volumes of alternative fuels, Singapore keeps the vessels that need repair, stores and services coming. And talent: the sector depends on marine engineers, naval architects, welders, riggers and project managers — a skills base under pressure from an ageing workforce and competition for engineering talent.
Outlook
The verdict is cautiously positive, and better-founded than at any point since the 2015 downturn. Seatrium has restored profitability, doubled earnings, and built a S$17.8bn order book weighted toward contracted FPSOs and offshore wind rather than speculative rigs; transport engineering led Singapore manufacturing growth in 2025; and the supplier base, class societies and bunkering hub give the yards an integrated advantage pure-play low-cost competitors cannot match. The honest counter: the order book’s strength is also its vulnerability. A book concentrated in a handful of mega-projects means execution risk is high — a delayed FPSO or a troubled HVDC platform hits margins directly, as the sector’s own history of write-downs shows. Singapore’s edge is engineering complexity and reliability, not price; the next test is not winning work, it is finishing it profitably.