Marco Polo Marine bets on renewables for future growth

THE pivot to the renewable energy sector for Macro Polo Marine (MPM) was something that CEO Sean Lee has been pondering for a while.

In the quest to turn around the business as oil and gas demand for vessels cooled in 2019, Lee and Darren Teo, managing partner at Apricot Capital (a major shareholder of MPM) had a conversation on pivoting to the renewable energy sector. A think tank was set up and ideas were bounced about for a year, but nothing concrete arose.

It took a vessel charter from a Taiwanese company to pique Lee’s interest in 2020. It was during Covid-19, and Lee made multiple trips to Taiwan, enduring long quarantines to talk to vessel charterers there.

“I realised that our vessels were working for the wind farms there, at that moment I thought it was an opportunity, we could repurpose our vessels to work for a different industry,” said Lee.

Further research to understand the market revealed a gap in the commissioning service operation vessel (CSOV) and the service operation vessel (SOV) space. SOVs offered little by way of margins, but CSOVs were looking attractive.