Erickson is expanding its operations in South America in the wake of its 2013 acquisitions of the helicopter assets of Evergreen Helicopters and Brazil’s Air Amazonia.
In January, Erickson announced a two-year deal with Brazil’s HRT Participações em Petróleo to provide two Sikorsky S-76C+ helicopters to service a rig 60 miles off the coast of Rio de Janeiro. Air Amazonia has been HRT’s aerial service provider since 2011. “This contract builds on our work being executed in Ecuador, Peru and Brazil and solidifies our strategic presence in South America,” said Udo Rieder, Erickson president and CEO. “This is our first win in the offshore oil and gas market and we look forward to continuing to expand our presence.”
Despite the recent downturn in world oil prices, Erickson remains upbeat about the prospects for serving the Brazilian offshore market. “Brazil is expected to lead the global growth of the oil and gas market over the next several years and is anticipated to see the highest increase in ranking of the world’s oil reserves between now and 2020,” Rieder said.
Since the Evergreen acquisition, Erickson has sought to diversify its service offerings, according to Susan Bladholm, Erickson’s director of marketing and business development. “Our company has experienced tremendous change in recent years and we want to stabilize through our diversification. Overall, we want to grow and balance our business lines so we see a reduction in market volatility, healthy organic growth and that we continue to attract and retain the best talent in the business. If we do that, we’ll continue to be able to provide comprehensive solutions for some of the world’s most challenging problems. Our core competency is that we truly are a full-service, one-stop global aerial services provider for our customers. They have a need and know that we’ll figure out how to do the job efficiently and safely.”
Bladholm said Erickson’s mixed fleet and experienced workforce makes it ideally suited for diversification and future growth. “We have talent that has been with us for more than 30 years, and we have pilots with 30,000 flight hours. It’s a remarkable group of skilled technicians, engineers, project managers and problem solvers that we have on our collective team. Secondly, our diversification really does differentiate ourselves from the competition. There is crossover capability for our fleet comprised of light, medium and heavy aircraft we can leverage between business lines; we have approximately 86 aircraft in our current fleet, but we lease many more at any given time. That gives us a lot of capability and capacity.”
Erickson is operating in some of the world’s most difficult markets, according to Bladholm. “We do business all over the world, but not only that, we often are located in the most remote areas where little or no infrastructure–meaning roads or runways–exist. We currently have our crews and aircraft in Africa, Afghanistan, Greece, Turkey, Australia, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Canada and of course in North America. One of our biggest new challenges is learning the South America oil-and-gas market. Their economy is robust, and we have several contracts in the region, so we’re actively analyzing how to effectively maximize our heli-services there.”