Aker Solutions is “more than” two-thirds of the way through a cost efficiency program that has cost in excess of 5,000 jobs since the start of the downturn.
In its Q1 report, the company said it is looking to shave at least 30% of costs by the end of the year.
More than 5,000 jobs have gone at the firm since the start of the downturn in 2014, according to the 2016 corporate responsibility report released earlier this year.
The bulk of the cuts were made between 2014 and 2015, when some 3,300 posts were made redundant.
Contractor use has also been slashed from 4,280 employed in 2014 to just over 1,790 on the books in 2016.
The update on the cost-cutting comes as Aker reports a revenue drop of more than a billion NOK in the first three months of the year compared to the same period in 2017.
Revenue decreased to 5.2 billion NOK in the first quarter of 2017 from NOK 6.5 billion a year earlier.
Aker blamed the global market slowdown and that fact that some projects were nearing completion.
The Norwegian oil services firm has been going through a major restructuring since the downturn started.
Highlights for the start of 2017 included integration of an acquired Brazilian maintenance and modifications provider as well as a transaction completed last month to buy the Norwegian oil and gas assets of Reinertsen, Norway’s third-largest offshore maintenance and modifications supplier.
Luis Araujo, chief executive officer of Aker Solutions, said: “We delivered yet another quarter with strong execution and improvement efforts that supported margins amid continued market challenges.
“We also seized further opportunities to grow a world-class services business that will be well placed to take advantage of a market recovery.”
The company won NOK 4.6 billion in new orders in the quarter, including a front-end engineering and design (FEED) contract from Statoil for the second phase of the major Johan Sverdrup development and an order from Kvaerner to provide engineering for upgrading Statoil’s Njord A platform in Norway.
New orders also included a contract for the hook-up of the riser platform at the Johan Sverdrup field and a FEED order from VNG Norge for the North Sea Pil & Bue development.
Aker also won 30 study awards for projects in Norway, the UK, the US, Australia and Malaysia.
The order backlog was NOK 30.7 billion at the end of the quarter, of which more than half was for projects outside Norway. Finances had a liquidity buffer of NOK 7 billion at the end of the period.
Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization were NOK 355 million in the quarter, compared with NOK 508 million a year earlier.
Aker said the outlook “remains challenging” as projects continue to be postponed amid a “volatile” oil-price environment.
However increases in front-end engineering services was thought to indicate a pickup in activity while tendering work was described as being “healthy”.
Aker said it is currently bidding for contracts totaling about NOK 50 billion. The majority of these are in the subsea area, where the company anticipates several greenfield projects to be awarded in the next 12 months.
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