Safeway strengthens commitment to the Asia Pacific vessel market

Ms Low comes to Safeway from MMA Offshore, and has more than a decade of experience working in offshore wind, renewables, and offshore oil and gas. In her new role, Ms Low will support customers and partners throughout Asia, strengthening the company’s regional sales and support activities.

As she explained, the walk-to-work market has been on her radar for some time. “Having spent many years supporting offshore operations, I’ve seen first-hand how critical safe access is,” she said. “At the end of the day, every technician, engineer and crew member deserves to get to work safely and just as importantly, return home safely to their loved ones.”

In her new role, she says, she is looking forward to working closely with clients and partners across the region, supporting safe and efficient offshore access while helping to grow Safeway’s presence in the APAC region, building on its proven track record with operators such as Boskalis, DEME, Jan De Nul, Seaway 7 and Shell.  She will be based in Singapore.

“Safeway has a growing presence in the Asia Pacific region in the offshore wind and offshore oil and gas sectors, not least because the Safeway gangway has a number of advantages compared to other walk-to-work systems,” Ms Low explained. “Safey is enhanced by the system’s roll compensation system and ‘hover mode’ with zero-impact landings, and its ability to increase uptime thanks to its high level of workability – the gangway can operate in significant wave heights of up to Hs 3.5–4.5 m.”

Other key features of the Safeway gangway she highlights include plug-and-play mobilization on newbuild or retrofit vessels, the fact that the system can be operated by a single operator, reducing crew costs, and the system’s 10-m vertical stroke, which ensures level landings at different heights. Although as Ms Low puts it, on a gangway on an offshore vessel ‘people are the cargo,’ Safeway also provides a 3D hoisting capacity of up to 1 tonne, with remote hook release, and can lift 10,000 kg offshore and up to 20,000 kg when a vessel is in port.

As Ms Low notes, the Seagull has become widely used in the Taiwan’s offshore wind industry and the company now has five systems in Taiwan alone, four of which are currently on contract. With the systems made available to the market via rental agreements, clients get to benefit from Safeway’s in-house support expertise whenever they need it, she says.

“We are already building on our position in Taiwan and exploring options in other, nearby markets,” said Ms Low, highlighting opportunities in the offshore wind market in South Korea and Japan.  “We want to bring the same ‘close to client’ approach to those markets too,” she explained.  

“There are also plenty of opportunities for us in the oil and gas market,” Mr Low concluded. “We already have experience in Brunei and West Africa and see the decommissioning project market as a hot one at the moment, one in which we expect the Safeway gangway’s ‘no contact’ hover mode to be particularly sought-after.”