Originally Posted by
The Witret
The oil & gas companies led this debacle, not the helicopter companies. They should be hung drawn and quartered to pay for their bullish, arrogant and frankly disgusting behaviour. The management of the helicopter companies always appear to be hammered on here. Honestly, if you knew about the behaviours on show even now you would be shocked. I’m giving up soon as I honestly can’t stomach working in such a twisted rotten to the core business which ruins good people just trying to keep something afloat. I’m sickened by it all.
I think you may have this backwards? The Helicopter Operators got bigger and bolder and Offshore Helicopters became a boom business, with every carpet-bagging chancer showing up to slurp from the trough. Managing the companies, changing financial strategies, cashing out of equity, leasing everything, it all changed in the last decade. Then you need to look at the management personnel themselves - we already know the behaviours of the "leaders" who enriched themselves, hired their friends and then ran each of these companies into the ground
(Quote. "They should be hung drawn and quartered to pay for their bullish, arrogant and frankly disgusting behaviour"). So which company should we consider first? CHC, PHI, Bristow, Era or Babcock as the big ones that made the biggest splash. The beneficial owners of the helicopter companies did this to themselves. They appointed people with zero knowledge, experience or interest in helicopters, then wondered why it didn't work out? And then the unthinkable happened, the bottom fell out of the oil market, (which for some of the more senior people in the industry, wasn't a first), and the entire house of cards collapsed. Manufacturers, Leasing outfits, Operators and anyone remotely involved in the offshore field watched it all fall apart.
So quite how this can be laid at the feet of the Oil Companies, doesn't compute with me. It is always easiest to blame your Customers, but if they can't pay your rates, they'll look elsewhere. And guess what? Another helicopter company is
ALWAYS prepared to do the work for less money - market forces at work. You can either keep flying, or shut the doors, and we have all seen what happened as a result. The only people who won were the incompetent Boards and Managements that allowed this situation to foment, grossly enriching themselves in the process, and the losers were anyone unfortunate enough to own stock in these companies, who saw their entire investment wiped out completely, and the employees that actually make the company run and generate the revenue, who ended up unemployed.
I do agree with you about getting out; today's helicopter business is not the one that the business was built on and has very little resemblance to the past organizations filled with talented, experienced people who garnered the respect of all around them, rather than the contempt of their staff. We are not at the end of it yet, and there will be more consolidation and likely much more pain before it ends. It is almost predictable that there will be other significant failures, sales, consolidation and changes in 2021, the scale of which is undetermined at this time. If there is no change into 2022, there may be widescale collapse of the largest operators who have now committed every asset with the hope of a turnaround, as the global business returns to smaller, more competitive, regional operators.
Or, maybe something completely different will turn the World on its head.