From shipbuilder to offshore wind giant: How S’pore firm’s early shift to renewables helped it pivot and scale up

Maintenance work at a shipyard used to be time-consuming and physically demanding.

Mr Chris Ong, chief executive officer of home-grown offshore and energy solutions firm Seatrium, says: “Next to our office in Tuas is a tall 700-tonne gantry crane. To do regular maintenance, our colleagues had to climb all the way up there and then start going through each component to check for downtime.”

A gantry crane can be as tall as 90m – the height of a 25-storey building – and workers were exposed to the blazing sun as they carried out their checks.

Today, the Seatrium maintenance team has it better, thanks to its Yard of the Future initiative, a digital transformation push supported by Enterprise Singapore (EnterpriseSG). 

By fitting cranes and heavy equipment with sensors, and developing digital twins of its global yards, Seatrium has created a real-time simulation of how its operations run. 

Engineers now monitor a single dashboard, are able to spot anomalies before they become major problems, and can plan work more efficiently.

“Only when they see abnormalities, like excessive vibration in the gantry, will they make that trip up there,” says Mr Ong.

Seatrium was established in 2023 with the merger of Keppel Offshore & Marine and Sembcorp Marine, two Singapore marine giants. 

The new company has grown far beyond its shipyard roots to become a global engineering solutions provider, serving both traditional energy and fast-growing renewables. That means building everything from oil production platforms to the offshore substations that transmit power from offshore wind farms to the onshore grid. 

Mr Ong has witnessed this evolution first-hand. Now in his 26th year with the company – his first job was with Keppel Offshore & Marine after university – he has seen the transformation from traditional shipbuilding into a major energy player. 

Today, he is overseeing the company’s global initiative to build the Yard of the Future with the support of EnterpriseSG.  

Building the Yard of the Future

For decades, Seatrium employees had to coordinate work at its shipyards in a manual way. Mr Ong says: “You had to call your counterpart in another country to ask about their yards and their occupation period. We had to do that with many different facilities before we could start work.”

With the Yard of the Future, those days will become a thing of the past. The initiative is a multi-year effort to digitalise operations and harmonise data across 13 yards worldwide, including in Brazil, China and Indonesia.

To assist Seatrium in digitalisation, EnterpriseSG provided grants and connected it to technology providers.

From there, the company deployed 5G connectivity, digital control towers, machine learning and augmented reality-assisted remote inspections and AI-enabled digital workflows. These innovations cut on-site manhours by up to 30 per cent and improve engineers’ efficiency by up to 20 per cent.

This digital system is what Mr Ong describes as the company’s “secret sauce”. It drives what he calls the One Seatrium Global Delivery Model – an approach where large projects can be broken down into smaller pieces, get assigned to the most suitable yard in its global network, and all the pieces are put together during integration at its Singapore yard.

For example, one yard might be better at welding steel structures, while another excels at electrical systems. By matching tasks to each facility’s strengths, the company can take on projects that would normally require a single massive shipyard. According to Mr Ong, this model allows Seatrium to compete effectively against marine companies that have much bigger facilities.

This distributed approach came from dealing with Singapore’s practical challenges.

“The world right now requires energy products of different complexity and sizes,” says Mr Ong. “How do we compete when land, labour and cost is an issue in Singapore? That’s how we came up with the One Seatrium Global Delivery Model.”

With this new way of working and the digital smart yard system, clients around the world can now track projects in real time. Seatrium’s operations have also become greener, thanks to predictive maintenance and condition monitoring.

This creates an edge when bidding for global contracts, especially as more clients prioritise sustainability.

Driving the energy transition

Offshore wind, in particular, has become a cornerstone of Seatrium’s shift to cleaner energy. The company was an early player in renewables, having built its first offshore substation in the UK in 2009.

To help Seatrium become a major player in the energy transition, EnterpriseSG has facilitated connections with project developers, supply chain players and government counterparts in multiple countries, including the UK, Poland, South Korea and Australia.

Since then, the company has delivered key infrastructure for offshore wind farms in Europe, including the Dudgeon and Hornsea 2 projects, as well as a 1.4 GW offshore converter platform for the Sofia Offshore Wind Farm – all located in the North Sea. Once fully operational, the Sofia platform will deliver clean energy to power approximately 1.2 million homes across the UK.

Building on its work in offshore wind infrastructure, the company secured the BalWin 5 offshore grid connection project in Germany in December 2025 as part of a consortium with GE Vernova, a global energy technology company. The project will help bring electricity generated by offshore wind farms in the North Sea onto Germany’s power grid, supplying enough renewable energy for about 2.75 million households.

“Seatrium has delivered or is in progress of delivering 16 GW of offshore wind products. This is more than the installed base of Singapore’s (power grid),” says Mr Ong.

EnterpriseSG has also given Seatrium a platform on the world stage. In June 2024, the agency led a Singapore delegation to the

Global Offshore Wind trade show

in Manchester, positioning Seatrium alongside other industry players as part of Singapore’s renewable energy capabilities, and providing exposure to international clients and partners.

Seatrium is actively pursuing over $11 billion in pipeline opportunities for offshore wind related contracts, underscoring its ability to compete at the highest level.

The company’s position in offshore wind builds on experience from its predecessor firms, Keppel Offshore & Marine and Sembcorp Marine, which began building such infrastructure as early as 2008.

In 2024, the company recorded $2.1 billion in revenue from renewables and cleaner energy solutions. This is a 15 per cent increase from 2023’s baseline. Renewables and cleaner energy solutions now account for approximately 30 per cent of the company’s order book as of Sept 30, 2025.

The queen bee

Building projects on this scale means Seatrium needs more than its own facilities. It works with various home-grown companies that supply steel, fabricate components and provide specialised services – giving these smaller firms access to large-scale international projects.

Mr Ong says: “Many times, we have to behave like a queen bee. When we go overseas, we not only have to convince customers of Seatrium’s ability to deliver; we have to convince them of our whole ecosystem.”

Working with EnterpriseSG, the company helps these firms upgrade, meet international standards and navigate foreign regulations.

“We can’t do it on our own,” adds Mr Ong. “When we put Seatrium, our small and medium-sized enterprises and EnterpriseSG together, then the answer is very clear – this is an efficient way of bringing our Singapore ecosystem out there to the world.”

The partnership has shaped how Seatrium competes globally, from digitalising across its 13 yards to securing major renewable energy contracts to bringing local suppliers into overseas markets.

“With EnterpriseSG by our side, we are building not just rigs and platforms, we are building the future of Singapore’s energy industry.”

This is part of a series showcasing how EnterpriseSG partners businesses in their defining moments of growth to achieve their dreams, by scaling, innovating, going global and building capabilities.

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