Overseas contracts boost PSN

OIL services giant PSN is on course to break the $100 million profit barrier this year after picking up a slew of high-margin overseas contracts and is predicting double-digit profit growth next year too.

Chief executive Bob Keiller said he expects profits to grow by 15 per cent this year, on the back of a 7 per cent rise in revenues to 780 million.

Aberdeen-based PSN, which has 8,500 staff globally, including 1,500 in Scotland, said its order book had risen from 1.5bn at the end of last year to 1.9bn.

In July, PSN signed a deal to decommission Shell's flagship Brent Delta platform in the North Sea, which is expected to start late next year.

Shell said that taking apart Delta alone is worth 200m and, with three other platforms in the Brent field, the dismantling of the field its expected to be a multi-billion pound undertaking, the largest of its kind in the world.

Keiller, who led the 178m management buyout (MBO) in 2006 from US firm Halliburton that created PSN, believes that winning the Brent contract puts his group inw an excellent position to win other decommissioning work.

In June, the company also won a contract with Caltex to manage the maintenance of two Australian oil refineries.

International operations at PSN are expected to grow from 50 per cent of its business to 75 per cent by 2014, with turnover expected to reach 1.14bn.

Keiller, who is also chairman of the Entrepreneurial Exchange, said: "Our original business plan when we did the MBO was to deliver profits of $75m by 2014. We hope this year to exceed the magical $100m (64m] mark, so you could argue that we're several years ahead of plan.

"We've taken a very rigorous approach to how we assess new opportunities and examine our cost base. It's become almost an engineering exercise - we've turned the business into a machine that can assess new opportunities and make the most of those. It's amazing what results can be achieved."