How Chris Ong helped Seatrium emerge from a messy merger between two shipyards to become a profitable offshore oil and wind giant

Over in Singapore’s Tuas industrial district, workers are assembling a giant floating production, storage, and offloading (FPSO) unit, part of the infrastructure that separates crude oil from what’s pulled up from offshore reservoirs. Next to it is a giant Goliath crane, which can lift up to 30,000 tons in a single heave; a gleaming white Royal Caribbean cruise ship sits just a few docks away.

This particular FPSO vessel, built by Singapore’s Seatrium, No. 42 on the Fortune Southeast Asia 500, will soon be bound for Brazil and its state-owned oil giant, Petrobras. It took around three to four years to get the ship completed, a lifetime compared to how quickly most goods get produced.

Seatrium’s most recent contract with Petrobras, a deal worth approximately 11 billion Singapore dollars ($8.2 billion) for two all-electric FPSOs, was signed back in May 2024, with first delivery expected in 2029. Much has changed since the contract was first signed. Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs rewired global supply chains, and the Iran war, with its closure of the Strait of Hormuz, upended the entire conversation around energy, particularly in Asia, which sources much of its oil and gas through that narrow chokepoint.

Chris Ong, Seatrium’s CEO, sees the Iran conflict sharpening what specialists call the energy trilemma, or the trade-off between energy security, affordable supply, and environmental sustainability. “The situation is now even worse because of the destruction of supply, which is still not fully priced in,” Ong says. “People don’t understand; they have been swung between different stories every day.”

Yet if oil prices stay elevated, Ong thinks that will unlock new offshore projects around the world. “I think a lot of projects would come online if the price per barrel were around $100.”

‘A builder and a businessman’

Seatrium itself is barely three years old, though its DNA stretches back to Singapore’s colonial-era naval docks, later converted by the newly independent government into commercial shipyards. The company itself was formed in 2023 when Sembcorp Marine absorbed its rival, Keppel Offshore and Marine. Sembcorp Marine was contending with COVID-era disruptions and a legal hangover from corruption investigations in Brazil; Keppel, meanwhile, had decided to reinvent itself as an asset manager and was eager to shed its manufacturing business.

As Ong explains it, Singapore couldn’t sustain two shipyards competing for the same scarce land, talent, and capital. “We were........

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