Solstad Offshore ASA, a supply vessel company, will merge with rival Rem Offshore ASA in the latest deal orchestrated by the Norwegian billionaire Kjell Inge Roekke to take advantage of the collapse in crude prices.
Aker ASA, Roekke’s holding company, last week blocked a Rem restructuring plan through a stake in the company’s bonds. Aker, which in June decided to invest 500 million kroner ($59 million) in Solstad’s refinancing, said on July 19 that Rem needs to participate in industry consolidation and that it would seek a solution for it together with Solstad.
“This is an industry confronting a very challenging market and which overall has too much debt,” Oeyvind Eriksen, Aker’s chief executive officer, said in an interview in Oslo on Thursday. “That creates a need to build bigger and stronger units.”
Rem will merge with a unit of Solstad in the so-called statutory triangular merger with Rem shareholders receiving 0.0696 Solstad shares for each Rem share. Solstad will create a new Class B share with the same economic rights as ordinary shares, which it intends “to be an instrument for further consolidation in the industry.”
The merger is the latest in a series of deals for Aker as it attempts to seize opportunities arising from the collapse of crude over the past two years, which has put pressure on both producers and companies offering services and equipment to the industry. Aker’s 50 percent owned oil company Det Norske Oljeselskap ASA last month announced a merger with BP Plc’s Norwegian unit, forming the Nordic country’s leading independent exploration and production company. Right before, Aker had sold stakes in two fishing companies.
