Just four years after it was founded, Apollo Offshore Engineering expects to expand its workforce 500% over the next five years as it plans to open an office in Singapore.
Managing director Jonathan D’Arcy, who founded the firm after he sold Prospect Flow Solutions to Hallin Marine Subsea in 2008, insists he will have no problem recruiting, despite an acknowledged engineering skills shortfall plaguing North Sea firms.
Director Jonathan White is the most recent addition to the company’s workforce. Previously acting in similar roles for both EPC Offshore and Aker Solutions, he joined the Waterloo Quay-based company as business development director last month.
The group now employs 50 – a target it reached a year earlier than planned on the back of the company’s growing business in the North Sea and in international markets. Apollo aims to expand as it shifts from working with “tier-two” companies such as services firms to “tier-one” giants such as Centrica, Talisman and Enquest.
Mr D’Arcy set out to create an international business to smooth out market peaks and troughs – particularly in the North Sea, where investment was at record levels but exploration bottomed out last year.
Along with CNR International managing director James Edens, who recently blamed Whitehall’s North Sea fiscal regime for recent declines, Mr D’Arcy sees taxation as an important investment criterion and it is one of the reasons he plans to open offices abroad.
“We know that the North Sea is down due to tax changes,” he said. “But the Gulf of Mexico, for example, isn’t.”
The company also now employs 12 people in an office in Nottingham.
In its third full financial year – the 12 months to September 2013 – the company turned over £3.2million, which was substantially up from £1.6million in 2011-12.